Job demands, poor support, isolated work and conflict on site are not soft issues in the regulations. They are named hazards a business has a legal duty to manage, and that duty does not scale with headcount.
Most builders think of work health and safety as falls, silica, plant and electricity. The regulations cover something else as well, and it sits closer to the daily running of a building business than any of those.
Safe Work Australia lists nine psychosocial hazards that commonly cause harm in construction work. Six of them describe an ordinary week on a residential site. Under the model work health and safety laws, a business must eliminate the risks arising from them so far as is reasonably practicable, and where that is not reasonably practicable, minimise them so far as is reasonably practicable.
That duty applies to a builder with four employees in exactly the same terms as it applies to a builder with four hundred. There is no small business exemption, and there never has been.
DEFINITION: PSYCHOSOCIAL HAZARD
A psychosocial hazard is anything at work that could cause psychological harm. Safe Work Australia notes the harm is not confined to psychological outcomes. Exposure is also linked to physical harm including musculoskeletal injuries, chronic disease and fatigue related injury. The duty to manage psychosocial risk sits in Part 3.1 and Part 3.2 Division 11 of the model Work Health and Safety Regulations.
What are the psychosocial hazards in construction work?
Safe Work Australia names these specifically for construction:
• Job demands
• Low job control, including situations where weather dictates whether work can proceed
• Poor support, including inadequate training
• Remote or isolated work
• Poor physical environment, including long hours in hot conditions
• Violence and aggression
• Bullying
• Harassment, including sexual harassment
• Conflict or poor workplace relationships and interactions
Read that list against a real job rather than in the abstract. A chippie sent out alone to a regional site is remote or isolated work. An apprentice put on the tools without being shown the task properly is poor support. A crew standing around waiting on a weather call they had no part in making is low job control. A supervisor and a client shouting at each other in front of the team is conflict, and the exposure lands on everyone standing there.
Six of the nine hazards named for construction describe an ordinary week on a residential site. That is the part most builders have not registered.
The point is not that any of this is new behaviour. It is that the regulations have a name for it, a test for measuring it, and an expectation about what happens next.
What the duty actually asks of a business
The framework is the same one builders already use for physical risk. Identify the hazards, assess the risk, control it, then monitor and review whether the control worked.
The assessment test is three things: duration, frequency and severity. How long is a worker exposed, how often, and how severe is the exposure. A single hard conversation is not the same as a job where that conversation happens every second day for eight months, and the regulations expect a business to be able to tell the difference.
On choosing controls, regulation 55D(2) of the model regulations sets out the matters a business must have regard to, and the list runs wider than most people expect. It covers the design of work and systems of work, the design, layout and environmental conditions of the workplace including safe entry and exit and welfare facilities, the plant, substances and structures on site, workplace interactions and behaviours, the information, training, instruction and supervision provided to workers, and how psychosocial hazards may interact or combine with one another.
The control measures Safe Work Australia points to are practical rather than therapeutic: regular breaks, staying in contact with people working remotely or in isolation, giving workers the equipment and training they need, setting out key tasks, responsibilities and expectations clearly, consulting workers so they know what is going on, and controlling the physical risks so incidents do not happen in the first place.
Review is required in five circumstances: where a control is not eliminating or minimising the risk so far as is reasonably practicable, before a workplace change likely to introduce new or different risks, when a new hazard is identified, where consultation indicates a review is necessary, and where a health and safety representative requests one on reasonable grounds.
Consultation runs through the whole thing. Under the model framework a business works through these risks with its workers and their representatives rather than deciding on their behalf, which is the same posture that applies wherever else licensing and compliance obligations sit in a building business.
In New South Wales the code became the standard on 1 July
For most of the past few years this has been a duty without a fixed benchmark. A business had to manage the risk so far as was reasonably practicable, and a code of practice helped explain what that looked like without being binding in itself.
That changed in one state on 1 July 2026. Section 26A of the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 in New South Wales commenced on that date. SafeWork NSW puts the effect plainly: with that commencement, codes of practice become the minimum performance standards a business is expected to comply with. A business must either follow an approved code, or manage the hazard differently in a way that delivers a standard of health and safety equivalent to or higher than the code requires.
The Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work code is an approved New South Wales code. Before 1 July it was evidence of what a business ought reasonably to have known. From 1 July it is the default position, and departing from it is what now has to be justified. The change applies to every approved code in the state rather than the psychosocial one alone.
Queensland has had an equivalent provision since 2018. Victoria operates outside the model laws with its own compliance code regime, where the status of a code differs again, and Victoria brought in its own psychological safety regulations separately. For a builder working across a border, the standard of proof now varies by which side of it the job sits on.
The free national tool for measuring this closes on 2 October
Which brings us to the timing, because the tool regulators have pointed businesses toward for the past six years is being switched off.
People at Work was the free psychosocial risk assessment process jointly funded by Australian work health and safety regulators. It measured fourteen psychosocial hazards, sorted into job demands and job resources, and returned a report benchmarked against Australian industry comparisons. It is being decommissioned, and the decision was taken at a national level rather than by any single jurisdiction.
| Date | What happens |
| 1 June 2026 | Final date for new accounts or organisations to register on the platform |
| 1 July 2026 | Final date for new surveys to be launched |
| 2 October 2026 | Final date for organisations to access the platform. All reports must be extracted before this date |
Source: WorkSafe Queensland, People at Work decommissioning notice and frequently asked questions.
The practical reach of that closure is narrower than it sounds for a residential readership. People at Work was built to survey a workforce, and it needed a minimum number of respondents before a result could be produced. In the regulator’s own published case study, an organisation with twenty staff describes itself as sitting just on the cusp of that minimum. Most residential builders were never going to be able to run it.
Five reasons have been given for retiring it, and none of them suggests the underlying problem has eased. The survey would need modification to properly cover additional hazards named in the model code of practice, specifically sexual harassment and isolated work. Response rates had gradually declined, reducing the impact of results. Users reported the post survey report could offer more detail to support targeted action. Redesigning it would require dedicated investment. And newer research has produced shorter, more precise evidence based tools.
Businesses that did use it can export their reports and only their reports. Raw survey responses are not available for download at all, with respondent privacy and anonymity given as the reason. Everything else comes off the platform when it is switched off. Certain material is retained under the Queensland Public Records Act and the associated retention schedule, and the deidentified data that powered the industry benchmarking passes to participating jurisdictions for research, with the Queensland Office of Industrial Relations remaining the data custodian.
No single national replacement has been nominated. Regulators are directing organisations to their own jurisdiction instead. In Queensland the recommended alternative is the mentally healthy workplaces risk assessment tool, which aligns with the fourteen hazards in the Queensland code of practice. Each state and territory regulator has published a contact point for the transition.
Why this lands harder in construction
Construction carries a heavier psychological load than most industries, and the scale of the mental health problem in construction is documented well enough that nobody in the sector needs persuading. It shows up early too. In the national survey of first year apprentices, mental health challenges accounted for one in ten apprentice withdrawals, which is a workforce problem as much as a wellbeing one.
The uncomfortable overlap is that the hazards on the regulator’s list are also the things that cost a building business money. Job demands and poor support sit behind a subbie walking off, an apprentice not finishing, and a supervisor making a call at nine at night that gets rectified at cost three weeks later. Managing them is not a separate exercise bolted onto the job. It is largely the same work as running the job properly.
What has changed is that a regulator can now ask how a business knows what its psychosocial risks are, and in one state can measure the answer against a published code. The duty was never satisfied by intention. It is satisfied by a process that can be shown.
THE GOOD BUILDER TAKE
The word doing the work here is process. Safe Work Australia describes psychosocial risk management as identify, assess, control, review. A survey only ever did the first two, and only for the moment it was run.
That is why the closure of the free tool matters less than it first looks, and why the duty underneath it matters more than most builders have registered. A business that treated the survey as the whole job was always exposed. A business that never had the headcount to run one is not, and never was, off the hook.
The version of this that fits a small builder is not a platform. It is knowing which of the nine named hazards actually turn up on your jobs, asking the crew rather than assuming, doing something about the two or three that matter most, and writing down what you did. That is unglamorous, and it is also the whole standard.
Frequently asked questions
Safe Work Australia identifies the common psychosocial hazards in construction as job demands, low job control, poor support including inadequate training, remote or isolated work, poor physical environment such as long hours in hot conditions, violence and aggression, bullying, harassment including sexual harassment, and conflict or poor workplace relationships and interactions. The risk from each is assessed by considering the duration, frequency and severity of a worker’s exposure to it.
Yes. Under the model work health and safety laws, a person conducting a business or undertaking must eliminate psychosocial risks so far as is reasonably practicable, and where that is not reasonably practicable, minimise them so far as is reasonably practicable. The duty sits in Part 3.1 and Part 3.2 Division 11 of the model regulations and contains no exemption based on the size of the business. Workers also carry a duty to take reasonable care of their own psychological and physical health and safety and that of others at the workplace.
Section 26A of the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 commenced on 1 July 2026. SafeWork NSW states that with that commencement, codes of practice become the minimum performance standards a business is expected to comply with. A business must either follow an approved code or manage the hazard in a different way that provides a standard of health and safety equivalent to or higher than the code requires. The Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work code is an approved New South Wales code, so it now operates as the benchmark rather than as guidance. The change applies to every approved code in the state.
The People at Work platform closes on 2 October 2026. That is the final date organisations can access it, and all reports must be extracted before then. New accounts and organisation registrations closed on 1 June 2026, and no new surveys could be launched after 1 July 2026. The People at Work website is also closing, with key information moving to the WorkSafe Queensland site. The closure does not change any legal obligation.
Organisations can export their reports before 2 October 2026 using the export guide published by WorkSafe Queensland. Raw survey response data is not available for download at all, to protect the privacy and anonymity of respondents. All other data is removed from the platform when it is decommissioned. Certain data is retained under the Queensland Public Records Act and the General Retention and Disposal Schedule, and the deidentified data used for industry benchmarking passes to participating jurisdictions for research, with the Queensland Office of Industrial Relations remaining the data custodian.
If you or someone on your crew is struggling, the services Safe Work Australia points businesses to include Ahead for Business, which is built for small business owners, Beyond Blue work and mental health resources, and NewAccess for Small Business Owners.
Sources: Safe Work Australia, psychosocial hazards and mental health guidance for the construction industry, including the model Work Health and Safety Regulations Part 3.1 and Part 3.2 Division 11 and regulation 55D(2); SafeWork NSW, codes of practice guidance on the commencement of section 26A of the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 on 1 July 2026; WorkSafe Queensland, People at Work decommissioning notice and frequently asked questions.
Last updated: 1 September 2026.
General information only. This article describes published regulator guidance and the model work health and safety framework. It does not constitute legal or work health and safety advice, and obligations differ between states and territories. Businesses should obtain qualified guidance specific to their own jurisdiction and circumstances.
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