Who owns psychosocial risk? What we heard from Melbourne's HR and safety leaders

Why Psychosocial Risk requires collective and collaborative ownership

At last week's Beyond the Risk Assessment panel in Melbourne, one line summed up a recurring frustration in the room. Talking about who takes the lead when a WorkSafe inspector shows up versus who handles day-to-day process, one attendee put it simply: "when it's going well it's HR, when it's going badly it's safety."

It's a familiar pattern. HR often reports to a different executive than health and safety, with different KPIs and different reporting lines, and psychosocial risk sits awkwardly across both.

Why the split causes problems

Dr Rod Gutierrez, panellist from dss+, described the ideal as three connected wheels: operations owns the risk and implements controls, HR designs many of those controls, and safety holds the assessment and evaluation process. When those wheels aren't connected, he said, organisations end up with risk assessments that look complete on paper but don't translate into anything happening on the ground.

Jackie Walsh from Bunnings described a practical fix her team used. Rather than leaving psychosocial hazards sitting in the safety function by default, they allocated a named risk owner to each one. The result: almost none of them ended up owned solely by safety. Interpersonal conflict, workload, job design, they sat with operations and people leaders as much as, or more than, with the safety team.

What this looks like in practice

A few approaches worth borrowing from the room:

• Map your psychosocial risks against actual owners, not against whichever function happens to hold the risk register.
• Build a shared escalation pathway so it's clear who leads when a complaint or an inspector activity happens, rather than working it out reactively.
• Treat controls as a joint HR and operations design task, with safety holding the assessment and review cycle.

None of this removes the tension entirely. But several attendees, from sectors as different as aged care and construction, agreed that naming ownership explicitly, rather than assuming it's understood, was the single most useful shift they could make.