The 17 Psychosocial Hazards, With Real Workplace Examples

The 17 psychosocial hazards come from the Commonwealth Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work Code of Practice 2024, which Comcare administers. They are: job demands, fatigue, low job control, job insecurity, poor support, lack of role clarity, poor organisational change management, inadequate reward and recognition, poor organisational justice, traumatic events or materials, remote or isolated work, intrusive surveillance, poor physical environment, violence and aggression, bullying, harassment including sexual harassment, and conflict or poor workplace relationships and interactions.

That is the answer people search for, so it comes first. The rest of this guide gives you what a list alone cannot: a realistic workplace example for each hazard so you can recognise it in your own organisation, an explanation of why other official lists count 14, and what the law actually asks you to do once you have the list in hand.

What does each of the 17 hazards look like in a real workplace?

A psychosocial hazard is any aspect of work design, management or interaction that has the potential to cause psychological or physical harm. The definitions live in regulator guidance; the recognition happens in ordinary situations like these. Each example below is the everyday version, the way a hazard looks months before it looks like a complaint or a claim.

1. Job demands

Sustained high (or sustained low) mental, physical or emotional effort required to do the job. Example: a claims team runs at 120% capacity for a whole quarter because two vacancies are never backfilled, and overtime quietly becomes the baseline expectation.

2. Fatigue

Work patterns that deplete people faster than they can recover. Example: a rotating roster gives warehouse staff a quick return, finishing at 11 pm and starting again at 7 am, several times a fortnight.

3. Low job control

Workers have little say over how or when their work is done, or their work is tightly managed. Example: a contact-centre script dictates every sentence, and toilet breaks must be requested through a queue system, even for experienced staff.

4. Job insecurity

Ongoing uncertainty about whether the job will continue. Example: a team is kept on rolling three-month contracts for two years, hearing about each extension in the final week.

5. Poor support

Inadequate practical assistance or emotional support from managers and colleagues. Example: a new site supervisor is given the keys, the roster and no handover, and their manager is too busy for the fortnightly catch-up three times in a row.

6. Lack of role clarity

Unclear, inconsistent or frequently changing roles, responsibilities or expectations. Example: after a restructure, two coordinators each believe the other owns incident follow-ups; both are later blamed when one is missed.

7. Poor organisational change management

Change that is poorly planned, poorly communicated or lands without consultation. Example: staff learn their office is closing from a customer who read it in the news, and the consultation session happens after the decision is signed.

8. Inadequate reward and recognition

An imbalance between the effort workers put in and the recognition or reward they receive. Example: the team that carried the system migration over six weekends is thanked with a group email, while the project sponsor collects the award.

9. Poor organisational justice

Lack of procedural fairness, informational fairness or interpersonal fairness. Example: two employees breach the same policy; one is quietly coached, the other is formally disciplined, and everyone notices the difference.

10. Traumatic events or materials

Witnessing, investigating or being exposed to traumatic events or material. Example: insurance assessors reviewing serious-injury claims daily, or rail staff involved in a fatality, without structured debriefing or follow-up.

11. Remote or isolated work

Working alone or somewhere help is not readily available. Example: a community nurse doing evening home visits alone, with a phone as the only backup and no check-in protocol.

12. Intrusive surveillance

Unreasonable monitoring or collection of information about workers. Example: keystroke and webcam monitoring installed on home-office laptops without consultation, with dashboards visible to team leaders.

13. Poor physical environment

Unpleasant, poor-quality or hazardous working conditions. Example: a demountable site office with broken air-conditioning through summer, constant machinery noise and nowhere to take a break.

14. Violence and aggression

Any incident where a person is abused, threatened or assaulted in circumstances arising out of their work. Example: emergency-department staff facing weekly verbal abuse, or retail workers confronting aggressive customers at closing time.

15. Bullying

Repeated, unreasonable behaviour directed at a worker or group that creates a risk to health and safety. Example: a supervisor consistently assigns one employee impossible deadlines, then criticises them in team meetings when the deadlines are missed.

16. Harassment, including sexual harassment

Harmful behaviour, including sexual and gender-based harassment, that creates a risk to health or safety. Example: jokes about a colleague's body in the group chat that everyone can see and no manager addresses.

17. Conflict or poor workplace relationships and interactions

Breakdown of individual or team relationships, task or relationship conflict, and incivility. Example: two long-tenured team members haven't spoken directly for months; work is routed around the feud and newer staff are pulled into taking sides.

Why do some lists say 14 psychosocial hazards and others 17?

Different regulators group the same content differently. Safe Work Australia's national overview lists 14 common psychosocial hazards; the Commonwealth code that Comcare administers enumerates 17 by listing hazards such as fatigue, job insecurity and intrusive surveillance as their own entries. State codes group them their own way again. The legal duty is identical under every count.

The count confuses almost everyone the first time, so it is worth saying plainly: the number is not the compliance obligation. What the law requires is that you identify the psychosocial hazards present in your workplace, whether that turns out to be six of them or fifteen, and manage the risks they create. Treat the 17 as a checklist for the identification step, not a scorecard.

It is also why international frameworks look different again. ISO 45003, the international standard for psychological health and safety at work, organises the same territory as a factor taxonomy across three domains: how work is organised, social factors at work, and the work environment. It is the framework our own Proactive EAP reporting maps to, with plain-language definitions reviewed by our clinical team, so that what surfaces in check-ins lands in language a risk register can use.

What happens when several hazards show up at once?

Regulator guidance is explicit that psychosocial hazards interact, and that interacting hazards raise risk. High job demands might be tolerable for a team with strong support and real autonomy. The same demands combined with poor support and job insecurity can become harmful quickly. Assessing hazards one at a time, in isolation, understates the real exposure.

This is the practical argument against once-a-year measurement. Combinations form between survey cycles: a vacancy stays open, a manager changes, a restructure lands, and a team that scored fine in March is carrying three interacting hazards by June. When you assess, look at what each group of workers is exposed to in total, and keep looking between formal assessments.

What are employers required to do about them?

Under WHS law, a person conducting a business or undertaking (PCBU) must eliminate psychosocial risks, or minimise them so far as is reasonably practicable. In practice that means running the standard risk cycle: identify which hazards are present, assess how they combine and who is exposed, control them starting with work design, and review whether exposure actually fell. Consultation with workers is required throughout.

The identification step is where this list earns its place: walk each team through it in consultation, alongside your incident, absence and complaint data. For the duty in full, see what managers must do to prevent psychosocial risks at work, and for turning findings into controls, applying the hierarchy of controls to psychosocial hazards.

How do you spot these hazards before they become claims?

Most of the 17 build gradually: workload creep, eroding support, slow-burn conflict. They move emotionally before they move operationally, which is why the usual data (claims, absences, complaints) only records harm after it has happened. Spotting them early means having a regular moment where people are actually asked, and somewhere for the answer to go.

An annual survey takes one photograph a year of a moving picture. The organisations that manage this well pair the formal assessment cycle with continuous, low-friction signals: regular emotional check-ins whose de-identified trends show where strain is building, team by team, while the formal register catches up. That reach-in layer, rather than waiting for someone to raise a grievance, is the design principle behind Emotional Pulse's approach to psychosocial risk.

CONCLUSION

The 17 psychosocial hazards are the Commonwealth code's enumeration of the work factors that can foreseeably cause psychological harm. Your obligation is not to memorise the list. It is to find which ones exist in your workplace, in consultation with your people, assess how they combine, control them at the level of work design, and keep watching between formal assessments, because the hazards that hurt people are usually the ones that formed quietly after the last review.

FAQ

Are employers legally required to manage all 17?

Employers (PCBUs) are required to eliminate or minimise the psychosocial risks that exist in their workplace so far as is reasonably practicable. You are not required to build a control for a hazard your workers are not exposed to, but you are required to have genuinely checked, in consultation with workers.

Is there a psychosocial hazards checklist?

The list above functions as the identification checklist most Australian organisations use. For the assessment step, regulators publish tools, including the free People at Work survey, and our guide to running a psychosocial risk assessment covers how to go from checklist to documented assessment.

Which psychosocial hazards are most common in office workplaces?

Job demands, low job control, poor support, lack of role clarity, poor organisational change management and inadequate reward and recognition dominate office contexts. Frontline and field settings add violence and aggression, traumatic events, and remote or isolated work.

Quick Answer: The 17 psychosocial hazards, per the Commonwealth Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work Code of Practice 2024, are: job demands, fatigue, low job control, job insecurity, poor support, lack of role clarity, poor organisational change management, inadequate reward and recognition, poor organisational justice, traumatic events or materials, remote or isolated work, intrusive surveillance, poor physical environment, violence and aggression, bullying, harassment including sexual harassment, and conflict or poor workplace relationships. Australian employers must identify which are present in their workplace, assess how they combine, and eliminate or minimise the risks so far as is reasonably practicable.