Since October 2022, employers in NSW have had an explicit duty to identify psychosocial hazards and control them using the hierarchy of controls. The duty is not new any more, and neither is the awkward question that travels with it: when a regulator, a board or a worker's lawyer asks how your organisation identifies psychosocial hazards, what do you point to?
What most organisations point to, and why it falls short
Usually one of three things:
- An annual engagement survey, which measures sentiment and satisfaction. It was designed for a different purpose, and hazards are not sentiment.
- Incident and claims data, which registers harm only after it has happened, when the duty is to control risk before injury.
- Consultation records: a toolbox talk, a policy acknowledgment. These show the topic was raised, not that hazards were measured.
Hazard identification needs an instrument built for it. One that asks about the working conditions the codes of practice actually name, produces results you can compare over time, and is safe enough to answer that people tell the truth.
Twenty-four items, eight hazard categories
CaseNote provides an anonymous 24-item survey structured across eight psychosocial hazard categories, including job demands, role clarity and exposure to traumatic events, aligned to ISO 45003, the international standard for managing psychological health and safety at work. It is short enough to finish in one sitting and specific enough that each category maps to a condition of work your organisation can change.
Anonymous by design, because honesty is the entire point
People answer questions about workload, role conflict and support honestly on one condition: they cannot be identified. So responses are never linked to a person. There is no re-identification pathway for an administrator to misuse, because the link does not exist. And where a group is small enough that a count could give someone away, results are suppressed automatically below n = 5. A group with four respondents shows a dot, not a number.
That protection is not decoration. A survey that could expose the people answering it would be a psychosocial hazard of its own.
From results to controls
Identification is only the first verb in the Regulation; the duty is to control. In CaseNote, each hazard category is benchmarked against your baseline and against the targets you set, so you can see whether a control moved the number or just moved the paperwork. Results feed de-identified reporting built from counts only, published alongside the team-health view. Separately, CaseNote's geographic reporting, built from operational incident records rather than survey responses, shows where traumatic-event load is concentrating, so controls can go where the hazard is rather than where the org chart says it should be.
The legal frame, briefly
Sections 55A to 55D of the WHS Regulation 2025 (NSW) require psychosocial hazards to be identified and controlled using the hierarchy of controls, a duty in force since 1 October 2022. Since 1 July 2026, section 26A of the WHS Act 2011 (NSW) has made approved codes of practice enforceable: an organisation must comply with the SafeWork NSW psychosocial code of practice, or manage the same risks in a way that meets an equivalent or higher standard. Every Australian jurisdiction imposes psychosocial duties; section 26A is a NSW addition on top of them.
A survey does not discharge any of that on its own. What it gives you is the identification step done properly, a benchmark to review controls against, and a record that both happened. This page is general information, not legal advice.