Introduction
Welcome to Prior Work. Here you will find key information about the platform.
Why Prior Work
Prior Work operates as a freemium psychosocial risk management platform grounded in the occupational health psychology literature on work stress - decades of research into why some work environments produce burnout and disengagement yet others are happy, healthy, and thriving.
Runs in your browser. No account or expensive and ongoing subscription required, no data retention, no third-party processing. Survey files stay on your machine. You stay in control of your data at all times!
The analysis doesn't just show frequencies or basic descriptive statistic 'hotspots' - see how psychosocial factors interact with each other to influence health and wellbeing outcomes with our interactive tools.
Our pulse surveys inform progress without disrupting your entire workforce and tying up HR/Comms team resources. Prior Work shows you specific psychosocial factors to track and effective sampling strategies.
Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) and have Anthropic's latest Claude AI model review your data to generate a custom professional, action-oriented report.
Legal and regulatory context
Every Australian state and territory now has its own Code of Practice for Managing Psychosocial Hazards, sitting under WHS or OHS legislation that requires employers to identify and control psychosocial risks with the same rigour as physical ones. Your organisation may also be aiming for compliance with the voluntary ISO 45003 standard; Prior Work maps cleanly to the hazard categories in either framework.
The risk management cycle Prior Work supports
The Model Code of Practice describes psychosocial risk management as a four-step cycle. Prior Work covers every step, plus we provide guidance to support your efforts with the consultation and communication requirements that wrap around them.
Our survey template captures the full psychosocial hazard set in a single pass. Save weeks building your own by downloading our template then import it into your preferred survey platform.
Model-based analysis shows the nature, seriousness, and likelihood of harm for each hazard. Bring your own API key (BYOK) to have the Claude AI tool analyse your data and generate a professional recommendation report for about the cost of a cup of coffee.
The Interventions page shows you your biggest leverage points while prioritising the types of controls you're presented, to ensure resources go where they will actually prevent harm.
Short, targeted pulse surveys evaluate your controls without disrupting the workforce or tying up WHS/HR/Comms resources.
The cost of not acting
Psychological injury claims typically cost more and run longer than physical claims. Safe Work Australia data shows 3–5× the compensation cost and 2–3× the time off work.
Source: Safe Work Australia, Work-related psychological health and safety (2022); Key Workers' Compensation Statistics (2021–22). Direct costs only - excluding voluntary turnover, reduced team performance, and recruitment reputation.
The research base
The constructs measured by Prior Work have been tested in hundreds of research projects and dozens of meta-analyses on work stress over several decades. Much like the Prior Work platform, the theories themselves build on the previous generation of research investigation and curiosity - the Karasek Job Demand-Control (and its extension JDC-Support) model, Siegrist's Effort-Reward Imbalance model, the Job Demands-Resources model, and related frameworks - that converge on a common picture of how the systems of work affect wellbeing.
That shared picture organises into four classes of construct and two pathways. It's the architecture the research literature is written in, and the architecture the WHS Codes of Practice ultimately rest on.
Aspects of work that require sustained effort and carry a physiological or psychological cost. Chronic or excessive demands drive exhaustion, burnout, and distress.
Aspects of work that help achieve goals, reduce the cost of demands, or stimulate growth. Resources drive engagement, learning, and thriving.
Positive self-evaluations, developmental opportunities, and team climates that buffer demands and amplify resources.
The endpoints of the two pathways: engagement (positive), burnout (negative), and general psychological distress.
The WHS Codes of Practice label every psychosocial factor a "hazard", which forces awkward double-negatives like "low levels of a lack of job control". As shown above, Prior Work sticks to the plain-language framing managers and support function teams have used for decades.
Want to know more about each Prior Work construct? Visit the Glossary - definitions, why each construct matters, and the source of every item we use to measure it.
A note on survey items
Most established psychosocial instruments carry restrictive commercial licences - per-user fees, tight non-modification clauses, or gated access through accredited providers. To keep Prior Work genuinely free and open, we have drawn on the two instruments that are unambiguously free to use and modify - the HSE Management Standards Indicator Tool (UK Crown copyright under Open Government Licence v3.0) and the Kessler K10 (public domain) - and, for the remaining constructs, developed our own items anchored to published construct definitions in the peer-reviewed literature.
Bespoke items are released under CC BY-SA 4.0. Because the item bank is new, it will improve through a continuous refinement process - pilot data, user feedback, and subsequent factor analyses will drive updates. The survey template, this catalogue, and the model files carry aligned version numbers; check the Changelog page for what's moved and why. Use our contact details to get in touch with your feedback.
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Download what you need to brief leadership and workers, and move straight into the survey. Edit to suit your organisation.