Preparing your psychosocial risk analysis.
“Our psychosocial risk analysis had been done. It had simply never been of any use.”
Prevention adviser, public social welfare centre, 250 people
What happened, told from the inside.
Where were you starting from?
Every five years we ran a questionnaire, received a thick report, and it ended up in a binder. Fewer and fewer people answered, because they never saw anything change.
What made you decide to act?
A new deadline was coming up, and two departments were piling up long-term absences. I did not want one more document: I wanted to know where to act.
What did you discover?
Reading the results department by department changed everything. What we took for a general malaise was in fact concentrated in two teams, with very different causes: workload for one, unclear roles for the other. Without that finer reading, we would have launched a general action that would have helped nobody.
What did you do next?
We built the action plan with the teams concerned, instead of writing it for them. Every measure had an owner and a date.
How did the teams experience it?
Warily at first: they had answered so many times before. When they saw their own results presented in a department meeting, without judgement, the tone changed. Several people suggested ways forward themselves.
What has changed?
The analysis became a working tool. Management refers to it in meetings, and the teams trust the process again: answering makes a difference. And at the next inspection, we had a complete file, and above all a living one.
A psychosocial risk analysis is not a formality. Done well, it is the best moment to listen to what your teams are going through.
Story composed from situations we meet in the field.
Psychosocial risk analysis.
Not quite your situation?
Will your next psychosocial risk analysis really be of use to you?
Thirty minutes to set out your situation and leave with a clear idea of what a measurement would tell you, and what it would not.