Victoria's New Psychosocial Hazard Regulations: What Mildura Employers Need to Do Now

If you employ people in Victoria, you now have a legal duty to manage psychological health at work the same way you manage physical safety. The Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations came into effect on 1 December 2025, and they apply to every Victorian employer, regardless of size. A five-person office and a fifty-person workshop carry the same obligation.

Here is what changed, and what it means for your business this month.

What the regulations actually require

The core duty is straightforward to state and harder to run properly:

1. Identify the psychosocial hazards in your workplace.
2. Assess the risk each hazard creates.
3. Control that risk, by eliminating or reducing it as far as reasonably practicable.
4. Review those controls and update them as your business changes.

This is the same identify, assess, control, review cycle Victorian employers already run for physical hazards like manual handling or machinery. It has simply been extended to cover psychological health.

What counts as a psychosocial hazard

The regulations define psychosocial hazards as factors arising from work design, systems of work, management practices, or interpersonal behaviour, that can contribute to stress or psychological injury if left unmanaged. In practice, that includes things like:

• Sustained high job demands or unclear role expectations
• Low job control, being given responsibility without the authority to act on it
• Poor support from managers or colleagues
• Bullying, harassment, or ongoing interpersonal conflict
• Exposure to traumatic or distressing events on the job
• Poor organisational justice, decisions that are inconsistent or feel unfair

If any of those sound like normal workplace friction rather than a compliance issue, that is exactly the point. This isn't about extreme cases. It's about the everyday pressure points most businesses have never formally looked at.

The part that catches businesses out

Training is not a control measure on its own. A toolbox talk on respectful behaviour or a wellbeing webinar might help, but the regulations are explicit that training and instruction can only be supplementary. The real control has to come from changes to work design, systems of work, and management practices, the things actually creating the pressure in the first place.

You are also required to consult with your employees and any health and safety representatives about psychosocial hazards and how you plan to manage them. This isn't a document you write in isolation and file away. It has to reflect what your team actually experiences.

What to do this month

For most SME employers, the practical starting point looks like this:

Start with what you already know. Look at your incident reports, grievances, exit interview themes, and absenteeism patterns from the last twelve months. This is usually where the real hazards are already visible, before you run a single survey.

Run a proper hazard identification process. This means talking to your team, not just your managers, about where the pressure actually sits. A short, well-run set of conversations or an anonymous survey will surface more than a policy document ever will.

Write it down. A risk register that names the hazards, rates the risk, and records the control measures is what a WorkSafe inspector will ask to see if they ever do.

Build the review into your calendar. This is not a one-off project. Set a date, six or twelve months out, to revisit it.

If that process feels like more than you have time to run properly alongside the rest of the business, that is precisely the gap an HR audit is built to close, a structured, independent look at where your current practices sit against what the regulations now require, with a clear, prioritised list of what to fix first.

Where to start

If you are not sure whether your current policies and practices would hold up, that is worth finding out before an inspector, or a workers' compensation claim, tells you the hard way. Book a chat and we will talk through where your business sits against the new requirements.