The Victorian Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025 came into effect on 1 December 2025. If you're on a board, in an executive role, or responsible for workplace health and safety, you've probably heard "psychosocial hazards" come up more and more over the past year. But what does it actually mean?
Not the consultant-speak. Not the watered-down HR summary. The actual regulatory definition—the one that now shapes your legal obligations.
This article breaks down what psychosocial hazards are, how they're defined in Victorian law, and why getting this right matters for how your organisation manages risk.
The regulatory definition
Under the Victorian regulations, a psychosocial hazard is anything in:
- How work is designed
- How work systems operate
- How work is managed
- How work is carried out
- How people interact at work
...that could cause someone to experience psychological harm.
Two things matter here. First: the hazard lives in the work, not the worker. Second: a hazard might cause harm—it doesn't have to be guaranteed.
This isn't about whether someone has a mental health condition, or how resilient they are, or how well they handle stress. It's about factors in the work itself—how it's designed, organised, managed, and done—that can cause psychological harm.
Think of it like physical safety. We've long accepted that working from heights can cause physical harm, so we manage it. The same logic now applies to psychological health. Working with traumatic content, for example, can cause psychological harm—so we need to manage that too.
The five categories of psychosocial hazards
The regulations and supporting codes of practice identify hazards across five broad domains:
1. Work design hazards
This is about how the work itself is structured. Think of it as the shape of someone's job. Are people constantly overwhelmed with more than they can realistically handle? Or the opposite—stuck doing work that's well below their capabilities? Do they have any say in how they do their work, or is every decision made for them? Do they actually know what's expected of them, or are they guessing? Repetitive, monotonous tasks also fall here—work that numbs rather than engages.
2. Systems of work hazards
This is about how work is organised across the business. It's the machinery behind the day-to-day. Unrealistic deadlines. Not enough people to do the work. Rosters that ignore the realities of life outside work. No time to recover between shifts. Not having the tools, training, or resources to actually do the job properly. These are systemic issues—they're baked into how the organisation operates.
3. Management of work hazards
This is about how work is led and supervised. It covers the quality of leadership people experience. Is change communicated well, or does it just land on people? Do supervisors actually support their teams? Is feedback given—and is it fair? When rules are enforced inconsistently or people feel treated unfairly, that's a management hazard. Recognition matters here too—people need to know their work is valued.
4. Carrying out work hazards
This is about what happens in the actual performance of work. Some jobs involve exposure to distressing content or traumatic events. Others mean dealing with aggressive customers or clients. Working alone or in isolated locations creates risk. So does any work involving violence, threats, or physically hazardous conditions. These hazards are often inherent to the role—but they still need to be managed.
5. Work relationship hazards
This is about how people interact in the workplace. Bullying. Harassment. Sexual harassment. Conflict that festers instead of getting resolved. Supervisors or colleagues who don't offer support when it's needed. Poor relationships at work aren't just uncomfortable—they're a genuine source of psychological harm.
What's deliberately left out
Notice what's not on the list: "low resilience." "Poor coping skills." "Pre-existing mental health conditions."
That's intentional.
The regulations focus on the work, not the worker. Psychosocial hazards are treated the same way as physical hazards—as things in the work environment that can harm people, regardless of who those people are.
Here's an analogy. You wouldn't list "fragile bones" as a workplace hazard. You'd list the fall risk. Same logic applies here. You don't list "poor resilience" as a psychosocial hazard. You list the work factors—like excessive demands, lack of support, or not enough resources—that create risk.
This matters because it changes what compliance actually looks like.
What this means for compliance
This definition has real consequences for how organisations need to respond. Three things in particular:
1. You need a proper process to find the hazards
You can't just run an engagement survey and ask people how they're feeling. That's not hazard identification. You need to actually look at how work is designed, how systems operate, how people are managed—and assess those against the five categories.
That means things like analysing jobs and workloads, observing how work actually gets done, and running structured processes to surface hazards.
2. You have to fix the work, not just support the worker
The hierarchy of controls still applies. You're meant to eliminate hazards first where you reasonably can, then redesign work to reduce risk—before you fall back on training, policies, or support programs.
If resilience training and an Employee Assistance Program are the primary controls being relied on, they are addressing impact rather than source—which is the reverse of what the regulations require.
3. Wellness programs aren't compliance
Mental health awareness campaigns, wellbeing apps, yoga at lunch—they might be nice to have. But they don't address psychosocial hazards as the regulations define them.
They don't change the work. And that's what compliance actually requires: changing the work, not just helping people cope with it.
The real question to ask
Don't ask "do we have psychosocial hazards?" Every workplace does.
The better question is: "Have we actually looked for the psychosocial hazards in our work? Have we assessed the risks? And have we put controls in place that fix the source of the problem?"
Many organisations haven't done this yet.
Not because they don't care about their people. But because they've been working from a different playbook—one that treats psychological health as a personal matter, something you support through programs and services, rather than something you manage by changing how work is designed.
The Victorian regulations ask for the second approach.
Getting clear on what psychosocial hazards actually are is the starting point for understanding what compliance looks like in practice.
Where to from here
If you're responsible for workplace health and safety in your organisation, the definition of psychosocial hazards comes with clear obligations:
- Find the hazards — Look across all five categories and identify what's present in your workplace
- Assess the risk — Work out how likely harm is, and how serious it could be
- Put controls in place — Start with eliminating hazards or redesigning work, before falling back on training or support
- Keep checking — Monitor whether your controls are working, especially when things change or incidents happen
This isn't optional, and it's not new thinking—it's the same duty of care approach that's always applied to physical hazards. It's just now being applied to psychological ones too.
The organisations that will handle this well are the ones that see the regulatory definition for what it is: not red tape to tick off, but a clear description of what can hurt people—and what you're legally required to do about it.
Need help identifying psychosocial hazards?
The Safe Minds Index™ provides a systematic framework for identifying, assessing, and managing psychosocial hazards across your organisation. Book a briefing to understand how it works.