SOURCE: Quarry Magazine | July 17, 2025
Holding Redlich shares how the quarrying industry can manage the psychosocial hazards and risks in the workplace.
It’s well established that Australian quarries have a responsibility to protect the health and safety of workers from physical harm on a site. However, businesses are also required to manage an all-too-often invisible harm.
Psychosocial safety is just as important, especially in heavy industries like mining and quarrying. It is a dynamic area of understanding for many stakeholders as awareness of mental health improves across the country.
Holding Redlich partner Jane Hall is one of the pre-eminent practitioners in the space, having spent more than two decades working in this subject area. Using her vast industry knowledge, Hall shared insights about psychosocial hazards and risks in the workplace with Quarry and how businesses in the quarrying sector can understand and carry out their obligations in this area.
“Most people want to understand how they can keep themselves and their colleagues and the people who work for you and with you safe,” Hall said.
“There is a moral imperative, we’d like to do the right thing and culturally it is really important.
“This is a much broader concept than what we have been dealing with before. The interventions that employers need to have, particularly in this sector, are broader than just information, instruction and policies.”
The rise of awareness of psychosocial hazard and risk has coincided on the back of sobering statistics from Australia’s key heavy industries. The latest data from MATES in Mining shows that between 11 and 25 mining workers (per 100,000 mining workers) die by suicide each year. In addition, blue-collar workers in male-dominated industries are at a higher risk of suicide than other employed men, while they are also eight times more likely to die from suicide than from workplace accidents.
Fly-in-fly-out workers show increased levels of distress. In the construction industry, data indicates that a construction worker is lost to suicide every second day.
This has seen more importance placed on businesses as primary duty holders to eliminate, or if elimination is not reasonably practicable, to minimise risks to health and safety so far as reasonably practicable.
There is nuance between how psychosocial risk and hazard are defined. According to the regulations, a psychosocial hazard is a hazard that arises from or relates to the design or management of work, a work environment, or plant at a workplace, or workplace interactions or behaviours, and may cause psychological harm, whether or not it may also cause physical harm. This can include a broad range of factors. A non-exhaustive list might consist of job demands, low job control, poor support, low role clarity, bullying, harassment, a poor physical work environment, traumatic events or material, remote or isolated work, violence and aggression, and conflict or poor workplace relationships.
A psychosocial risk is defined under the regulations as a risk to the health or safety of a worker or other person arising from a psychosocial hazard. A duty holder, including quarries, can be expected to eliminate or minimise psychosocial risks so far as is “reasonably practicable”. For duty holders, reasonable practicability can include consideration of the likelihood, degree of harm, cost of eliminating or minimising risk, available ways to mitigate or eliminate risk, and a person’s awareness of the hazard or risk. Consideration should also be given to how these matters and potential hazards interact or combine in the workplace through job design, demands, tasks, systems of work, physical environment and other environmental conditions.
“What we are grappling with is a large, tricky problem. There are some risks and hazards that are more prevelant and businesses have been dealing with them for a long time, and then there are others that are a more complex as they are interrelated and they will require more thinking from all of us and specialist intervention by someone with the appropriate expertise,” Hall said.
What quarries can do
It can be hard to understand where to start as a business in an area with a broad scope.
In many ways, the principles to deal with psychosocial hazards and risks are similar to how quarries manage plant equipment, handle manual tasks, work from heights, or work with electricity.
The first step is identifying which psychosocial hazards are prevalent in your workplace. This can be nuanced, but the code of practice can guide quarries in this area.
Hall recommended that businesses visit the SafeWork Australia website for reliable information on this topic.
SafeWork Australia provides a code of practice, associated guidance materials, and practical guides to help businesses implement best practices for managing psychosocial health.
Data is essential for any business conducting a workplace risk assessment. Quarries can consult with their workforce and use surveys, data-based tools, and workplace observation tools to help the business identify potential hazards. It can also be beneficial to gain the input of an organisational psychologist as part of this process.
“Organisations are increasingly spending time asking about this in their people surveys and using the data from these surveys to input into their risk assessment processes,” Hall said.
“What we’ve been saying to our clients, where they may be in remote areas or not have the money for this expertise, most of them have an EAP provider, and we understand that most of the EAP providers are building the capability to do risk assessments.
“Your EAP provider is a really good starting point where most of you will already have existing commercial relationships with them.”
After gathering the data and expert opinions, the company leaders must communicate about the data they have received so they can input it into a risk assessment plan.
A lack of communication can lead to data being lost or not acted upon in a way that can mitigate or eliminate potential hazards.
“This information will live in a range of different places. You might have datasets in your leave records, you might have illness reports, sick leave records, complaints through your HR function, or other areas,” Hall said.
“While it is important not to compromise the confidentiality that’s associated with employment investigations, it is important to understand that data from a range of sources needs to be input to manage these issues.”
Above all else, Hall recommended quarries seek out specialist expertise for guidance.
“There are plenty of people who have started to consult and work closely with businesses on this tricky topic,” Hall said.
“Everybody is working hard to understand what the regulations look like in their sector and the nuance that needs to be applied to its management. It will look different for different people.”
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