With the People at Work survey closing in October, HR leaders now carry personal liability for psychosocial risk failures
More than 5,000 Australian businesses are about to lose the free government tool they have relied on to track psychosocial risk, and HR and health and safety leaders could be held personally liable if they fail to find a replacement in time.
The People at Work (PAW) survey, jointly developed by Safe Work Australia and state and territory regulators, will be permanently decommissioned on 2 October 2026, closing a resource used by more than 160,000 individual workers since it launched in 2020.
Businesses have already lost the ability to launch new surveys on the platform since July, according to a new whitepaper from Clearhead, a mental health and wellbeing support provider. The paper warns that regulators have no plans to replace PAW, even as Work Health and Safety (WHS) laws increasingly require employers to actively monitor psychosocial risk – not simply collect data on it once a year.
Dr Angela Lim, co-founder and chief executive of Clearhead, a paediatric doctor and former Harvard researcher, said regulators had been candid about the tool's shortcomings. Speaking to HRD Australia, she explained that engagement with PAW had been declining for two key reasons.
"It's one thing to collect the data, but it's a different thing if you're not taking actions against the data," Dr Lim said. "So employees will feel, what's the point...
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