TopTeams Beyond Psychosocial Legislation Compliance

Authors: Cass Spong, Sally Clarke, Katie O’Keeffe

Shifting the focus: from hazard reduction and compliance to creating the condition for thriving.

Victoria’s new psychosocial safety laws have changed the landscape and present an opportunity that is far greater than just compliance – to embrace a systems challenge that demands a deeper understanding of the conditions that lead to thriving teams and organisations, so that we can reduce risk and unlock performance at the same time.

Sara, a project manager, is starting to notice a silent strain on her team. Deadlines are being missed, communication seems stifled, and even small decisions feel monumental. When reflecting with her coach, Sara wonders if recent redundancies and a lack of clarity around ongoing roles are eroding morale and productivity.

Sara’s concerns now have compliance implications. Victoria’s psychosocial hazards legislation came into effect on 1 December last year. Sara’s organisation now has a clear mandate to proactively identify, assess and control psychosocial hazards, including factors like high job demands, poor role clarity, and bullying, harassment, and conflict.

This legislative shift highlights the reality that psychosocial harm is rarely the result of a single individual or incident, but rather emerges from the interaction of systems, structures, leadership practices, and team dynamics. How work is designed, decisions are made, priorities are set, and relationships are navigated all shape whether or not psychosocial risks accumulate.

The compliance trap

Some organisations are responding by rolling out psychosocial risk surveys, incident hotlines, and policy updates focused on bullying, harassment, and workload. These tools are often reactive, focused on individual experience, and produce high-level risk ratings that are difficult to translate into targeted actions.

When risk management is treated primarily as a detection exercise, organisations can inadvertently adopt a pathological lens – one that looks mainly for deficits, failures, and breakdowns.

Just like in physical health, the absence of illness does not guarantee the presence of wellbeing or thriving. A compliance focused approach may meet minimum legal requirements, but it often obscures the systemic conditions that give rise to psychosocial hazards in the first place and may not lead to the creation of thriving teams and organisations.

Common issues with a compliance-driven mindset include…[Download the full article here].

Academic paper in The Journal of Positive Psychology - Systems informed positive psychology

Systems informed positive psychology
Cass Spong, Margaret L. Kern, Paige Williams, Rachel Colla, Kesh Sharma, Andrea Downie, Jessica A. Taylor, Sonia Sharp, Christine Siokou & Lindsay G. Oades

Received 12 Jun 2019, Accepted 21 Jun 2019, Published online: 12 Jul 2019

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ABSTRACT:

Despite the rapid growth and uptake of the positive psychological perspective by researchers and general audiences, hype regarding the field’s potential can lead to exaggerated claims, over-inflated expectations, disillusionment, dismissal, and unintentional harms. To help mature the field, we propose Systems Informed Positive Psychology (SIPP), which explicitly incorporates principles and concepts from the systems sciences into positive psychology theory, methodologies, practices, and discourse to optimize human social systems and the individuals within them. We describe historical underpinnings of SIPP, outline the SIPP perspective, clarify epistemological, political, and ethical assumptions, and highlight implications for research and practice. We suggest that SIPP can generate possibilities for creating sustainable unimagined futures.