Make it business as usual
You have been round the process once; the shift comes from what happens next. Watch your lagging indicators between surveys, fold psychosocial risk into the planning and review your organisation already does, and re-run the full survey in one to two years to confirm it.
Make it part of how you already work
The surest way for this to lapse is for it to stay a project with its own meetings and its own paperwork. Attach it to things that already run.
- Your risk register
- Add the psychosocial hazards you found alongside the physical ones, with the same owners and review dates. A separate register is a register people forget.
- A meeting that already happens
- Put the action plan on the agenda of a forum that already meets, rather than starting a new one. New forums lapse; standing agendas do not.
- Leadership and board reporting
- Include psychosocial risk in the report that already goes up. It keeps the accountable person accountable between surveys.
- Change processes
- Restructures, new systems and workload shifts are where psychosocial risk is created. Add a check before those land, not after.
- Induction and manager onboarding
- New managers inherit the conditions, so they need to know what was found and what was agreed.
Reviewing the actions themselves belongs with the plan: the review page of the action plan template carries what to check and record each time one comes up.
Tell workers what happened, every time
Step 6 asks you to communicate the plan. The part that gets dropped is doing it again at every review, including the reviews where little moved. Workers most often disengage from the next survey not because nothing changed, but because nobody told them either way.
An update is short. Below is example wording for each part, in the voice the reader would hear it in. Replace it with your own changes, dates and evidence.
- You said
- “Urgent requests come from several managers at once, and we cannot tell which one to drop.”
- We did
- “We set up a single request queue and a weekly workload review. Your manager can defer work when the team is already full.”
- We are checking
- “On 2 November we will look at overtime, overdue work and what you tell us. If competing deadlines are still a problem, tell your manager or your health and safety representative.”
What to watch between surveys
No single measure tells the story. Pair leading indicators, which describe the conditions that produce future harm, with lagging ones, which count harm that has already happened. Pick a few you can collect consistently rather than building a dashboard for all of them.
Leading
- ·Hazard and near-miss reports
- ·Pulse survey results
- ·Repeat survey scores
- ·Action plan completion
- ·Worker consultation frequency
- ·Manager support skills
Lagging
- ·Psychological injury claims
- ·Sick leave rates and trends
- ·Voluntary turnover
- ·Complaints and grievances
- ·Working while unwell
- ·Regulatory notifications
When to come back
Choose intervals that suit the risk and how fast your conditions change. Bring a review forward when work changes, a new hazard appears or a control is not working. Do not wait for the calendar.
- Quarterly
- Look at the indicators you chose and any worker feedback. Update leadership and adjust the plan if something is not moving.
- Annually
- Review the risks and whether the controls worked. Record the decisions and report them.
At 6 to 12 months: a pulse
A targeted follow-up with a random sample, once the actions have had time to take effect. The tool picks the factors worth tracking from your model, accepts partial responses, and compares against your baseline. Pulse data can also update model probabilities, so the next full cycle starts from a revised picture.
See step 7: Pulse survey.
Every 1 to 2 years: the full survey again
Upload the new results to Data Analytics and rebuild the model. It may shift between cycles, which is expected as the workplace changes. What you are hoping to see is hazard responses moving from high and moderate towards low, with outcomes following: the clearest signal at workforce level that the actions worked. Check who responded and what else changed before reading a difference as cause.
Keep what the next cycle will need
- Use Save project for the whole working session and Save model for a model on its own. Keep a dated baseline before you replace it. Both controls are in Data Analytics once a model is loaded.
- Keep the original survey and pulse response files, the question wording, the scoring rules and your recruitment notes in your organisation's own storage. Raw pulse responses are not kept between visits.
- Keep the action plan, the worker updates and any exported reports separately. Browser storage can be cleared, so it is not a backup.
A comparison is only as good as what you kept. Consistent wording and scoring are what let the next survey be read against this one.