Managing stress and safeguarding staff well-being is no longer just an HR issue; addressing psychosocial hazards is becoming a regulatory requirement. Around the world, regulators are tightening occupational health and safety laws to include psychological risks alongside physical ones. This trend is particularly visible in Australia, where a major compliance milestone is approaching. Beginning December 1, 2025, employers in Victoria, Australia, will be legally required to identify, manage, and prevent psychosocial hazards as part of their obligations under workplace health and safety laws.
The introduction of mandatory regulations on psychosocial hazards is driving a broader global shift—encouraging organizations to move beyond compliance, embed employee mental health into organizational resilience, and reduce the risk of costly penalties.
Australia Sets the Benchmark for Global Psychosocial Compliance
Australia’s regulatory landscape is setting the pace globally, with multiple states already incorporating psychosocial hazard management into their laws. Following Safe Work Australia’s Model Code of Practice on managing psychosocial hazards at work, jurisdictions including New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, and the ACT have already made psychosocial risk management mandatory. Victoria’s new laws, effective December 2025, will further expand the scope of these requirements.
Why Businesses Must Comply with Psychosocial Guidance
Failing to manage psychosocial hazards is no longer only affects the well-being of the workforce. It now brings serious potential legal and financial consequences in many jurisdictions, including:
- Enforcement or infringement notices that can lead to prosecution.
- Litigation and workers’ compensation claims for psychological injury.
- Fines and penalties for failing to meet duty-of-care obligations.
- Reputational damage from regulatory action or high-profile cases.
- Increased insurance costs and disruption from long-term absence or turnover.
Regulators now expect organizations to show proactive management of psychosocial hazards with documented policies and measurable actions.
How Organizations Must Demonstrate Compliance
Demonstrating compliance with psychosocial hazard regulations poses several significant challenges, including:
- Outdated risk assessment criteria: Traditional risk assessments primarily focus on likelihood and consequence, often failing to capture frequency, severity, and cumulative impact.
- Insufficient monitoring: Psychosocial hazards require frequent monitoring, as their impact can increase when endured over long periods.
- Fragmented processes: Managing risk assessments, incident reporting, and controls in silos with no single source of truth, limits visibility into overall risk exposure.
- Lack of audit-ready evidence: Many organizations have insufficient documentation to prove ongoing monitoring and intervention to regulators.
- Limited understanding of regulatory expectations: Organizations struggle to understand what processes they must implement to demonstrate compliance and continuous improvement in alignment with ISO 45003.
- Integration challenges: Firms struggle to integrate their processes for psychosocial hazards into their broader OHS framework to achieve a comprehensive view of organizational risk.
Managing psychosocial hazards in accordance with regulatory requirements becomes nearly impossible with siloed data, fragmented risk processes, static policies, or insufficient documentation. Increasingly, organizations are embracing more sophisticated tools, such as dedicated GRC software, to capture, track, and report on risk and compliance activities in real-time.
How ISO 45003 Sets the Benchmark for Psychosocial Risk Management
Increasingly, regulators are referencing the widely adopted ISO 45003 standard as the benchmark for best practices. Whether you’re in a jurisdiction like Australia, where compliance is required, or you’re prioritizing psychosocial health proactively, ISO 45003 is proving to be the standard. The ISO standard provides the globally recognized framework for identifying, assessing, and managing psychosocial hazards. It also addresses issues such as excessive workload, unclear role definitions, inadequate change management, and harassment. It outlines how these risks should be managed and integrated into broader occupational health and safety systems.
To align processes with ISO 45003 and the mandatory regulations in Australia (including those impacting businesses in Victoria on December 1, 2025), organizations will need to:
- Identify, manage, and track psychosocial hazards in the workplace.
- Implement controls, processes, and policies to prevent psychological harm.
- Adjust risk assessments to consider time endured, frequency, and severity.
- Introduce formalized processes for capturing, escalating, and resolving psychosocial incidents.
- Treat psychosocial risks with the same rigor as physical risks.
- Demonstrate compliance with documented evidence of policies, risk monitoring, and incident reporting.
- Provide documented evidence of continuous improvement efforts.
By aligning processes to ISO 45003 now, organizations can:
- Standardize their approach to psychosocial risk.
- Embed continuous monitoring and controls into daily operations.
- Provide regulators with clear evidence of due diligence and compliance.
- Ensure alignment with mandatory psychosocial hazard requirements imposed by regulators.
- Achieve ISO 45003:2021 certification to win more business and attract better talent.
Demonstrate ISO 45003 Compliance with Software
Meeting these new regulatory demands in Australia and aligning processes with ISO 45003 requires more than policies. It demands proof. Implementing dedicated software tool such as a GRC platform enables organizations to integrate psychosocial risk management into a single, auditable framework. Reports from these systems provide actionable insights to reduce exposure to psychosocial hazards and ensure compliance with relevant regulations.
When using GRC software to manage psychosocial hazards, you can:
- Build searchable risk registers: Centralize psychosocial risks, define key risk indicators, and link them to control activities.
- Create customized risk assessments: Develop tailored risk assessment forms to capture the time, frequency, and severity of potential risks. Use workflows to automate circulation and response collation.
- Facilitate continuous monitoring: Running regular surveys and collecting feedback enables you to track risk exposure over time.
- Capture and resolve psychosocial incidents: Ensure every psychosocial event is logged, triaged, escalated, and resolved — with a complete audit trail.
- Automate regulatory reporting and documentation: Generate detailed reports showing compliance status, risks, and improvements to satisfy regulators, auditors, and executives.
- Manage the policy lifecycle: Manage policy changes, distribute updates, and track acknowledgments to prove alignment with evolving requirements.
By consolidating these processes into a single platform, organizations can demonstrate to regulators that they are meeting their legal obligations and prioritizing employee well-being.
Is Your Organization Prepared to Meet These Upcoming Requirements?
With Victoria’s new regulations only months away and other global jurisdictions likely to follow suit, now is the time to act. Psychosocial risk management is no longer just an HR concern; it is becoming a mandatory compliance obligation with legal, financial, and reputational consequences, including fines and penalties.
By adopting software to manage psychosocial hazards, aligning with ISO 45003, and preparing documented audit evidence, you can prepare your organization for the psychosocial regulations impacting your region.
Whether you are based in Australia and need to comply with psychosocial regulations or want to align your processes with ISO 45003 to protect staff well-being, reach out to Riskonnect for a demo of our GRC platform.
Do your current methods align with ISO 45003?
