This is a common statement in my Working with Monsters! workshops over recent months.
As I help organisations navigate their psychosocial journey, the safety, HR, and IR silos become very clear. They are simply not talking to each other about psychosocial safety!
I often have safety, HR, IR and/or senior leaders in the room, each with their unique field of expertise, however, few are truly integrated to efficiently address the psychosocial safety conundrum.
HR commonly views psychosocial safety as their domain, dealing with events through their administrative HR lens. Not surprising given workplace bullying has been seen as an “HR issue” for decades (I’m generalising, not my view folks! 😊).
IR professionals often see psychosocial safety events as opportunities to amend Enterprise Agreements and keep people, and organisations, out of Employment Tribunals.
Safety teams are now accepting psychosocial safety events as their domain, applying various investigative methodologies to determine the ‘’root cause’’ and apply ‘’corrective actions’’. Although there is a shift away from formal investigations and towards Learning Teams and no blame, not all situations can (or should) be a learning event (even Bob Edwards, the Learning Team Guru himself, acknowledges this fact).
My view, and something we unpack in the workshops, is that psychosocial safety events are a truly multi-disciplinary event, not “owned” by one function over another, but requiring all disciplines to work together to get the right outcome for the worker and business.
To create a psychosocially safe workplace, you must first create a psychologically safe place for people to speak out without fear of retribution. If you have this, it makes the psychosocial safety journey much easier, and quicker!
But when psychosocial safety events do happen, it’s critical to address them quickly, collaboratively, fairly, and transparently with rigor in the investigation process. Professional and rigorous investigation allows the information to be compassionately obtained, with a person centric approach, but ensures it can become evidence and be used in future legal proceedings, if needed.
HR and IR investigations tend to be administrative or civil processes, with investigations resulting in an administrative or civil sanctions of some sort.
Safety investigations are criminal investigations. These are a different level of investigation with different rules of evidence applied to the inquiry.
Therefore, I suggest that psychosocial safety event inquiry teams, whether a Learning Team or more formal investigation process, have professionals from each discipline involved, bringing their unique experience to the table but, more importantly, allowing a broader 'psychosocial lens overseeing the event.
Reporting
Senior leaders tell me they want real time data to have visibility of the psychosocial safety landscape of their organisation. They want to see where the psychosocial safety risks are within their business and what’s being done about them. This visibility spans HR, IR, and Safety reporting lines but, in reality, I rarely see uniformed reporting across these disciplines.
To help with visibility and reporting, I use two platforms to help organisations manage these situations.
Skodel, in the front-end prevention space, is a platform that facilitates reporting of stressors, their duration, impact, and root causes (deliberately plural as there is rarely only one cause).
It identifies psychosocial hazards, such as excessive job demands, and offers immediate solutions to employees like awareness of leave entitlements, ensuring documentation for effective intervention.
Skodel allows accurate and timely data to improve psychosocial safety visibility across the business.
However, where an event does occur, I use the Rely Platform to receive, triage, investigate, and report on the investigative management of the psychosocial safety event.
Rely is a whole of organisation investigation management solution that was built from the ground up to ensure data was not locked within siloes and could span the likes of HR, IR, Safety, and broader governance. Their founding team includes deep investigation experience which allows for accurate and credible management of the investigation process.
Not many workplaces start from a place of great psychological safety, so it’s important to provide workers with an avenue to raise issues anonymously. Both platforms provide workers with a voice to ventilate psychosocial safety events, anonymously or not, allowing them to share their experiences as workplaces create psychological safety.
So, reflect on where the psychosocial safety responsibility lies in your organisation.
Who “owns” it?
Who is “responsible” for it?
Do you have a process to allow workers to anonymously raise psychosocial issues?
Who is reporting and what is being reported?
How, and who, is managing your psychosocial safety events?
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