Psychosocial Hazard Work Re-Design Tool (PHReD-T)

The Psychosocial Hazard Work Re-Design Tool (PHReD-T) was designed as an aid for developing skills, competency, and confidence in work-redesign. The work re-design strategies are developed to prevent and manage psychosocial risks.

It was originally developed for people with responsibilities for managing WHS, such as WHS advisors, consultants and managers, but is also relevant to a range of roles, including HR and any other managers with WHS duties.

The PHReD-T is accompanied by a range of supporting materials that provide information about mental health, psychosocial risks, and work design. These include audio case studies, activities to complete, a fully worked example of the PHReD-T, and reading materials.

The tool is activity based – it asks you (and/or your team) to enter information related to one scenario identified by you or your team in your workplace, and guides you through how to analyse that scenario; identify psychosocial risks; suggest re-design ideas; plan the re-design strategies with change logic and evaluation methods; and consult and improve the design based on feedback.

There are lots of different ways in which you could use the PHReD-T. As noted above, it was designed as a competency development tool rather than a risk assessment tool per se, though it does include some elements of risk identification. You could consider completing the PHReD-T:

• By yourself, as a competency development exercise. You might choose a real scenario in your current workplace, or one you’ve experienced in the past.

• Alongside colleagues. You could ask each other for assistance as you proceed and compare the action plans that you develop.

• Together with colleagues. You might work on one scenario together, and consider using the tool separately later, as necessary. In this case, consider the relative experience and confidence of the people in your group, and make sure that the supporting materials have been consulted by everyone before use.

In addition, you could use the PHReD-T as part of participation and consultation processes. You might have someone who is experienced at using the tool facilitate a group of workers, managers and senior managers in a participative and collaborative manner.

It is anticipated that advanced or experienced users will eventually start to use elements of the PHReD-T in their regular WHS practice in a manner that suits their needs and organisational context.

When you use the tool may depend on the purpose for which you are completing it. For example, as professional development or to help with a particular scenario that is occurring, or as a training for other members of your organisation.

The PHReD-T can be used repeatedly to work through a range of experienced or anticipated scenarios in order to plan strategies for work re-design. When used repeatedly in a workplace, there may be opportunities for spreading skill development across a team, and supporting other staff to become more familiar with psychosocial risks and the PHReD-T approach to work re-design.

Similarly, once you review a scenario with the PHReD-T for the first time, you may then be prompted to review another scenario with the PHReD-T that was identified throughout the initial process.

Anyone can use the tool, though it was designed for those in WHS advisory or professional roles. We envisage that anyone with responsibilities to WHS should be able to use the tool, including HR managers, line managers and supervisors, senior managers and duty holders and consultants....

The PHReD-T is relevant to any industry. It has not been developed with a particular industry in mind. It asks you to outline the specific context of your workplace, similar to what is done in a basic a risk management process, and in safety management systems standards (see AS/NZS ISO31000:2018; AS ISO45001: 2018)

The tool can take some time to complete, as it requires you to think deeply about the scenario you’ve chosen and reflect on the information in the background materials to guide you.

We strongly suggest that you do read the supporting materials, and engage with the case studies and other activities before trying to complete the tool. The supporting materials are quite short and can be viewed on mobile devices to make this as easy as possible for you. The case studies are also available in audio format so can be listened to rather than read.

The PHReD-T is split into a number of steps, which can be broken down further into smaller sections, so you may only need short periods of time to work on each step or parts of each step.

You do need to allocate time to review the supporting materials and complete the tool. The total time taken will depend on your experience in psychosocial risks and work re-design, and the way you engage with the materials (e.g., alone, in a group etc).