5 Reasons it’s Good Practice to Assess Protective Psychosocial Factors
In most cases, psychosocial work factors can act as either hazards or supports, contributing to harm or benefits.
Here are five reasons it’s best practice to assess both aspects where relevant within your Psychosocial Risk Assessment:
- Ensuring a Holistic Perspective: Evaluating both harms and benefits promotes a more comprehensive, accurate view, avoiding the negativity bias that can arise when focusing solely on risks.
- Improving Leadership Buy-In: Simply hearing the name ‘Psychosocial Risk Management’ causes most leaders fear. When we add to this a sole focus on only identifying hazards and assessing risks, that fear is often compounded. But when we also assess protective factors and highlight strengths, leadership fear is reduced, and we’re more likely to receive budget that can achieve real psychosocial environment improvements.
- Understanding the Interrelated Nature of Factors: For example, work overload and high emotional demands may cause minimal harm if buffered by strong protective factors like beneficial manager and co-worker support. Understanding these dynamics requires assessing both harms and benefits to gain insight into how they’re interacting.
- Respecting Individual Experience: Due to our unique histories and personal circumstances, the same psychosocial factor can be experienced as harmful by some, and beneficial by others. Assessing this reality provides a more accurate understanding of each worker’s experience.
- Enhancing Control Measure Effectiveness: By assessing both the harms and benefits of a factor, we move toward better insight into its overall influence on the psychosocial system. This enables more strategic prioritisation, focusing on the most influential factors to drive meaningful improvement across the system.
In practice, the traditional risk-focused approach has often missed these insights due to an occupational hygiene model that treats psychosocial factors as solely needing risk mitigation.
