Psychosocial hazards in the workplace start in your team's week

What are the psychosocial hazards in the workplace?

The World Health Organization names risks such as excessive workloads or work pace, understaffing, lack of control over job design or workload, limited support from colleagues, an unclear job role, violence, harassment or bullying, job insecurity and conflicting home and work demands.

The CSA Z1003 standard on psychological health and safety organizes the same ground into thirteen psychosocial factors, which the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS) lists: Balance; Civility and Respect; Clear Leadership and Expectations; Engagement; Growth and Development; Involvement and Influence; Organizational Culture; Protection of Physical Safety; Psychological Competencies and Demands; Psychological Protection; Psychological and Social Support; Recognition and Reward; and Workload Management. The CCOHS notes that researchers at Simon Fraser University identified them, and that the standard is available for free from the CSA Group website.

Read the list as a map, not a scorecard. Three of the factors, workload management, involvement and influence, and psychological and social support, are the ones a manager's choices about the week touch most directly.

How do you spot psychosocial hazards in a team?

Look for each hazard where it operates: workload in the calendar, control in a decision, support in a hand-off. You do not need a survey to ask the first question; a normal week of the team is enough to start.

In the calendar, start with workload. Are there any blocks without interruption? Does the real work move only in the evening or on weekends? In Statistics Canada's Canadian Survey on Working Conditions for 2024-2025, half of workers in management (50.2%) reported frequently working to tight deadlines, meaning half the time or more over the previous 12 months. If your managers are part of that half, their calendars are the first place to read it.

In a decision, look at control and fairness. Who decides what? How many people approve something one person could do? Is a settled decision reopened the next week? Quebec's workplace health and safety body, the CNESST, describes organizational justice as workers' assessment of whether the policies and decisions that affect them are fair. A decision that touches the team is either explained before it lands or it is not.

In a hand-off, look at support and recognition. When someone is stuck, whom do they ask? A team that always waits for the same person's input has a bottleneck, and a bottleneck is often an overloaded person. Does finished work get a specific response, or silence? In 2024-2025, 79.5% of Canadian employees said their colleagues were usually supportive and 73.6% said their manager was. Those averages do not describe your team.

The CCOHS lists several ways to assess psychosocial hazards, among them internal data such as complaints, absenteeism and turnover, and feedback gathered through conversations, observation, group discussions, anonymous forms and surveys. Most organizations will need more than one. It also states that the person assessing is not responsible for determining a diagnosis of another person's mental health. Team members, a manager included, can note where there may be an area of concern that needs further assessment.

The check below takes about a minute. It uses five of the ten statements in OHA's capacity self-portrait, one for each load.

Why is spotting a hazard only the start?

Because spotting tells you where to look, not how much each hazard weighs or which one to move first. To know whether a change helped, you also need to repeat the same reading afterwards.

The World Health Organization recommends that employers prevent work-related mental health conditions by managing psychosocial risks, through organizational interventions that directly target working conditions. The CCOHS adds that control measures aimed at the source of the hazard come first, and that measures affecting the whole organization come before those individuals take on their own.

OHA's Five Loads give that reading a structure: decisional, cognitive, emotional, relational and administrative load. They sort what you spotted, the missing block of focus time, the reopened decision, the stalled hand-off, into five kinds of demand with different remedies. The Capacity Diagnostic is designed to measure them across a team and again at 90 days, inside OHA's Capacity Circle™. The details are in our post on what a capacity diagnostic actually measures.

For readers with Quebec establishments, and for information only: under Quebec's Act respecting occupational health and safety, as amended by Loi 27, an establishment's prevention program or action plan must provide for identifying the risks that can affect workers' health, including psychosocial risks linked to work, and for measures to eliminate or control them.

What should a manager do with what they spot?

Pick one hazard, not five, and one change that alters the work rather than the person. For workload, protect two uninterrupted blocks in the week and drop a recurring meeting that ends without a decision. For control, write down who decides what and when a decision can be reopened. For support, name a second person to turn to when the first is away.

The CCOHS gives an example of a whole-organization measure: consistently asking workers for input in job design can protect everyone against exposure to low job control. A resilience workshop teaches people to carry a load; it does not remove an approval step or move a decision to the person who should own it.

Then put a date in the calendar, about 90 days out, to look at the same three places again: the calendar, the decision, the hand-off. Tell the team in one sentence what you are changing and why. If nothing moved, either that was not the hazard weighing on the team or the change was too small, and either way you will know.