Psychosocial hazards at work: the full list

Key takeaways

• Psychosocial hazards are the specific, recognised conditions of work that can harm someone's mental health. The Model Code of Practice sets out around 14 of them.
• They're concrete, not abstract. Each one shows up as an identifiable pattern you can point to in a real team.
• Hazards rarely arrive alone. They tend to combine and concentrate in particular teams or roles, which is exactly where the risk gets serious.
• Naming the hazard correctly is the first step in the assessment process. You can't control what you haven't identified.
• Once you can see the pattern, the fix is usually more specific, and more achievable, than "improve culture."

In our consulting work, we once sat with an executive team convinced their turnover problem was "just the market." A look at the exit data showed every resignation had left the same team, under the same manager, citing the same thing: no one told them what was actually expected. That's not the market. That's a named, recognised psychosocial hazard, and once you can name it, you can fix it.

This is the list. It comes from the Model Code of Practice: Managing psychosocial hazards at work, and it's worth knowing cold, because you can't manage what you haven't identified.

What counts as a psychosocial hazard

A psychosocial hazard is anything in the design, management or organisation of work, or in the working environment, that could cause psychological harm. It's not about someone's personality or resilience. It's about the conditions of the job itself, grouped by the Model Code of Practice into a list every state regulator now works from.

High job demands

What it means. Sustained workload or time pressure that exceeds what's manageable, for long enough to matter.

What it looks like. A team down two headcount for six months, quietly absorbing the gap. The tell isn't a busy week. It's "busy" becoming the permanent state.

Low job control

What it means. Little or no say over how, when or in what order work gets done.

What it looks like. A process worker who can't influence their pace or method, paired with high demands. High demands with high control is often energising. High demands with low control is where the risk lives.

Poor support

What it means. Inadequate support from supervisors, peers, or the organisation, when someone needs it.

What it looks like. A manager who's unreachable, or who reacts badly when someone flags a problem, so people stop flagging problems. Support isn't a policy on paper. It's whether someone feels backed when things go wrong.

Lack of role clarity

What it means. Not knowing what's expected: responsibilities, priorities, or how performance will be judged.

What it looks like. Two people quietly doing the same job with no idea whose call it is. This one hides well, because everyone assumes someone else explained it.

Poor organisational change management

What it means. Change (restructures, system rollouts, leadership shifts) handled without adequate warning, consultation, or support.

What it looks like. A restructure announced by email with no chance to ask questions. People can usually absorb change. What they struggle to absorb is change done to them.

Low recognition and reward

What it means. Effort and contribution going unnoticed, or reward disconnected from what people actually do.

What it looks like. A high performer whose extra effort has quietly become the new baseline, with no acknowledgment it was ever extra. Its absence is more corrosive than people expect.

Poor organisational justice

What it means. Inconsistent, unfair or non-transparent processes and decisions, whether that's how work is allocated or how complaints are handled.

What it looks like. A complaint that visibly goes nowhere. A promotion that bypasses the obvious internal candidate with no explanation. People tolerate a decision they disagree with more readily than one they can't see the logic in.

Traumatic events or material

What it means. Exposure to traumatic incidents, distressing content, or the aftermath of serious harm as part of the job.

What it looks like. Emergency services roles, but also content moderators and claims staff reviewing distressing material. This needs deliberate, specific controls, not a generic wellbeing program.

Remote or isolated work

What it means. Working alone, or with limited access to support, supervision or colleagues.

What it looks like. A single field worker covering a large territory, or a remote employee who goes days without a real conversation about work. Isolation compounds every other hazard on this list, because no one's nearby to notice.

Poor physical environment

What it means. Noise, heat, poor lighting, or unsafe and uncomfortable workspaces adding sustained stress on top of the work itself.

What it looks like. An open-plan office so loud that focused work needs headphones and heroics. It doesn't need to be dangerous to be a hazard, just a constant, low-grade drain.

Violence and aggression

What it means. Exposure to actual or threatened physical violence, from customers, clients, the public or colleagues.

What it looks like. Retail or healthcare staff facing regular aggressive customers, or a tradesperson working alone in an unpredictable setting. This one tends to get taken seriously once named, which is exactly why naming it matters.

Bullying

What it means. Repeated, unreasonable behaviour directed at a person or group that creates a risk to health and safety.

What it looks like. A manager who consistently belittles one team member in meetings, or a pattern of exclusion hard to pin to one incident but unmistakable over time. Often minimised as "personality clash." It rarely is.

Harassment, including sexual harassment

What it means. Unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature, or harassment on the basis of a protected attribute, creating an offensive or intimidating environment.

What it looks like. Comments dismissed as "just a joke" that the recipient experiences very differently. This carries its own legal obligations beyond the psychosocial duty, and needs its own clear reporting pathway.

Conflict or poor workplace relationships

What it means. Ongoing, unresolved conflict between individuals or groups that isn't being managed.

What it looks like. Two team leads who haven't spoken directly in months, routing everything through their teams instead. Unaddressed conflict doesn't stay contained. It leaks into decisions and into who's included.

Hazards combine, and concentrate

Here's the pattern we see constantly. These hazards are listed separately because that's how the code sets them out. In real workplaces, they don't show up one at a time.

A team with high demands, low control and poor support isn't three problems. It's one compounding one, usually concentrated in a specific team or manager relationship rather than spread evenly across the business. That's good news for you as a leader: the fix doesn't have to be organisation-wide. It has to be precise.

If you see this pattern	It's usually these hazards, combined
High turnover in one team, low elsewhere	Poor support + lack of role clarity
Constant "urgent" requests, no pushback allowed	High demands + low job control
Complaints go quiet, no one raises issues anymore	Poor organisational justice + poor support
Good performers quietly burning out	High demands + low recognition

Once you can see the combination, you're not managing "culture" in the abstract. You're managing a named, addressable risk.

What to do with this list

Naming the hazard is step one, not the whole job. Once you know which of these are present in your business, and where, the next move is to assess how serious each one is and work out what to do about it. We walk through that process in how to run a psychosocial risk assessment, with a simple template for tracking it.

For the legal backdrop, see psychosocial safety at work. For where accountability sits once a hazard is identified, duty of care and psychosocial risk covers that directly.

This is general guidance, not legal advice. It'll help you name what you're seeing; it doesn't replace your own legal and WHS advice.

Frequently asked questions

Do all 14 hazards need to be assessed in every workplace?

You should be aware of all of them, but not every hazard will be present, or present at a meaningful level, in every workplace. Identification means working out which ones actually show up in your business, and where, not ticking off a uniform checklist regardless of relevance.

Is one instance of bullying automatically a psychosocial hazard?

The Model Code frames hazards as conditions of work, and bullying specifically involves repeated, unreasonable behaviour, not a single poor interaction. A single serious incident still needs to be taken seriously and managed in its own right, alongside the ongoing hazard framework rather than strictly inside it.

How do we find out which hazards are actually present in our business?

Look at real data rather than guessing: exit interview themes, absenteeism patterns, grievances, incident reports, and well-facilitated conversations with staff. We cover this in how to run a psychosocial risk assessment.

Is a psychosocial hazard the same as a mental health condition?

No. A hazard is a condition of work that could cause harm, separate from whether a specific person develops a mental health condition as a result. You manage the hazard regardless of whether harm has occurred yet, the same logic as fixing a trip hazard before someone falls.

Once you've named the hazards in your own workplace, Whyser Work's culture module is built to help you track and act on them as part of everyday work rather than a separate compliance project. Or book a demo if you'd rather talk through what you're seeing.

Which of these 14 would your own team name first, if you asked them honestly?