Managing psychosocial hazards at work - Call centre

Persons conducting a business or undertaking, or PCBU for short, must ensure the health and safety of workers and others. This includes managing psychosocial hazards and risks at work as much as managing physical hazards and risks. PCBUs must manage psychosocial risks in accordance with Part 3.1 of the Work Health and Safety regulation. This includes eliminating psychosocial hazards so far as reasonably practicable. Psychosocial hazards must be identified and their risks assessed, controlled, and continually reviewed to protect workers' health and safety. A psychosocial hazard arises from, or relates to, the design or management of work, a work environment, plant at a workplace or workplace interactions and behaviours. It may cause psychological harm, whether or not it causes physical harm. PCBUs must consult with their workers about psychosocial hazards relevant to their work. Workers often have valuable insights about the impact of psychosocial hazards and potential ways to control the risks.

In this video, we're exploring a case study from a call centre. We will review how this workplace identifies, assesses, controls and reviews the psychosocial hazards and risks in their workplace. See if you can spot them all before we give you the answers.

A call centre business has offices in Brisbane and a regional city along with a team that works from home. Workers primarily deal with customers telephone inquiries and complaints. There is no management located at the regional office, just a small number of call centre workers. There is no structured communication process with the regional office or with those working from home and information is not communicated consistently. There are tightly scripted responses, protocols, and service standards to deal with the calls and limited time allocated to spend with each person. Long call queues with automatic call drop-ins means they feel constant time pressure. Workers always do the same tasks and their break times are regimented. Customers can become abusive due to long wait times. After a recent restructure, workers became unsure about their roles and future workloads. A new IT system with performance monitoring software is making workers anxious. They have not yet been trained and they're concerned it will be used to increase workload, reduce autonomy, or even sack them.

Let's take a look at what psychosocial hazards and risks are present. Workers experience roll overload from the constant time pressures and required response times, which are inadequate for complex matters. Workers are at risk of violence and aggression from distressed clients. There is a lack of task variety. As work is tightly scripted and roles are narrow with poor support. There is a lack of role clarity and poor organisational change management around the new IT systems and restructure. Management does not provide consistent communication regarding changes within the organisation and regional workers are often left out of training regarding changes to organisational systems. Workers who work remotely may be isolated. There is a lack of recognition. Career opportunities are often not communicated to regional workers or those who work remotely and are subsequently overlooked within the organisation.

After consulting with supervisors, work groups and health and safety representatives, the organisation takes the following steps to control the risks. They renegotiate service level agreements and response times, so they are manageable within existing worker numbers. They implemented triaging process for complex issues including sending these to more experienced workers first or where this is not possible, junior workers flagging if they need help. They provide customers alternative options like leaving a message for a callback when wait times are lengthy. They provide task rotation so workers can build new skills and get a break from stressful calls or interactions. They develop customer behaviour standards and restrict services if workers are exposed to inappropriate behaviours. These standards are recorded and consequences played to customers upon first contact prior to speaking with workers. They allow workers to terminate calls in accordance with behaviour standards and consequences. They flag customers with a history of breaching standards and ensure restrictions are followed. They ensure workers take short breaks away from their workstation. They provide emotional support during and following abusive interactions. For example, the ability to escalate the issue to a supervisor, debrief time, and to recover away from the general work area if required. They develop call monitoring policies in consultation with workers and use these for coaching. They ensure consultation and training on the new IT system is provided before it is introduced and relax the performance targets until workers are familiar with the new systems. They ensure scheduled meetings with the work from home and regional team and ensure communication protocols are set up to capture information sharing. They create opportunities for work from home and regional teams to be included virtually with the Brisbane team or attend the Brisbane office.

The organisation identifies risks and adequacy of controls, gets workers to complete the people at work, psychosocial risk assessment survey, and monitors and reviews other work, health and safety data. They ensure the leadership team of all completed training on their work health and safety duties and good work design and are applying these to future restructures and planned it upgrades. They investigate opportunities for automated web-based services. For example, online applications. They support workers who want temporary secondments to other parts of the business for two-way learning and a break from the regimented work. They review systems to ensure workers located in work from home teams and regional offices feel connected and supported and obtain feedback from workers. They review systems in place to manage behaviour standards of customers and restrictive services. They create systems to monitor the number of abusive calls and exposure to these behaviours within the work environment. The supervisor supports workers who want to develop technical or specialist skills and provides technical and specialist workers with the opportunity to mentor new workers, and the supervisor becomes a member of an industry mental health community of practice to get ideas and support on managing psychosocial hazards and risks from other peers in the industry.

In this example, we saw how to identify different psychosocial hazards in a call centre organisation. Often these hazards will interact and if exposure is frequent, prolonged, or severe can lead to work-related stress and subsequently psychological harm. The identifying hazards in this example include high job demands, poor support, violence and aggression, poor organisational change management, low reward and recognition, and low job control. Control measures were used at multiple levels to eliminate as well as minimise the risk. This example shows that psychosocial hazards, the types of control measures implemented, and the monitoring and review strategies can differ widely for organisations in different industries and of different sizes. It's important to consider the unique context of your organisation, including your organisation-wide systems, work practices, work environment, workplace behaviours, and types of tasks and roles.

For more information, download the Managing the Risk of Psychosocial Hazards At Work Code of Practice 2022.

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