The psychosocial duty stopped being general. Here is what changed.

Most people leading a team already knew they had some obligation around mental health at work. It sat somewhere in the general duty of care, alongside everything else, and it could be satisfied in good faith by caring about your people.

On 1 December 2025 that changed in Victoria. Employers now carry a specific duty to identify psychosocial hazards, take reasonable steps to eliminate or control the associated risks, and review those controls.

The difference between a general duty and a specific one is not legal hair-splitting. It changes the question you have to be able to answer.

From intention to evidence

Under a general duty, "we take wellbeing seriously" is a reasonable answer. Under a specific duty, it is not an answer at all. The questions become procedural:

• Which psychosocial hazards exist in this workplace?
• What did you do about each of them?
• When did you last check whether it worked?

Those are the same three questions you would already be able to answer about a trip hazard or a faulty ladder. Most organisations simply have never been asked to answer them about how work is designed, allocated and managed.

What actually counts as a psychosocial hazard

This is where most teams get stuck, because the language sounds abstract until you translate it. In practice the common ones are ordinary and recognisable:

• Job demands that are consistently higher than the time or resources available.
• Low role clarity, where people are unsure what they are accountable for or receive conflicting instructions.
• Poor support, whether practical, informational or emotional.
• Exposure to aggression from customers, clients, patients or the public.
• Unresolved conflict and poor workplace relationships.
• Low recognition or effort that consistently goes unacknowledged.

None of those are personality problems. They are features of how work is set up, which is exactly why they are treated as hazards and controlled at the source.

Why this is fairer than what it replaced

There is a version of workplace mental health that quietly puts the burden on the individual. Run a resilience workshop, put up an EAP poster, and the people who cope are fine while the people who struggle are treated as not quite up to it.

The specific duty moves that burden back where it belongs. If aggression is part of a role, the control is not a more resilient worker. It is preparation, staffing, escalation paths and a reporting system people actually trust. If job demands are the hazard, the control is the workload, not the person carrying it.

That reframing is the single most useful thing a leadership team can take from the change.

The most common gap we see

It is rarely unwillingness. It is that nobody taught managers to see this category of risk.

A supervisor who can run a toolbox talk on manual handling has usually had no equivalent training on noticing that a capable team member has gone quiet, that a roster is producing sustained overload, or that a customer-facing role has stopped reporting incidents because nothing happened the last three times.

Those are learnable skills. They are not intuitive, and they do not arrive with a promotion.

A reasonable first step

You do not need a consultant to begin. You need one honest conversation with your leadership group about which of the hazards above are genuinely present in your workplace, and what you currently do about each one.

If the answer to "what do we do about it" is a document nobody can describe, that is a finding. Write it down. It is the start of the record the duty now expects you to keep.

Where we fit

We run Psychosocial Safety Leadership for managers, supervisors and business owners: what the hazards are, how to identify them in your own workplace, and what to do in the ten minutes after you notice something. It is built around your organisation rather than a generic checklist, and it is delivered by facilitators who have led teams rather than only read about it.

If the duty has landed on your desk and you are not sure where to start, let's talk about what your leaders need.

Apex Learning and Development, RTO 46324.

Source: WorkSafe Victoria, new regulations making psychological health a priority, 2025.