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.
Why the survey was scrapped
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 of me spending my time doing this? I never see any actions that come out of it. It's a waste of my time."
She added that newer psychosocial hazards identified as state and federal WHS regulation was updated over the past two to three years – including remote work and sexual harassment risks – were never properly captured by the ageing survey, which was originally developed in 2007.
The personal liability employers are missing
Dr Lim said the most overlooked consequence of the shift is how far liability now extends beyond the boardroom. Where accountability for workplace failures once stopped at chief executives or board chairs, updated regulation now reaches heads of HR, people and health and safety functions directly.
"If there is repeated identification that there is a hazard going on that these officers have ignored, and it has caused someone to either attempt or complete suicide, this gross negligence will actually result in a personal fine of up to $2.3 million and up to 10 years in jail," Dr Lim said, adding that some jurisdictions could pursue industrial manslaughter charges carrying sentences of up to 25 years. Companies themselves face fines of up to $11.8 million, and none of these penalties can be insured against.
That personal exposure applies from day one once the new expectations take hold, she said. "I think you have to assume that it is live from day one... saying that we didn't know is not a defensible position."
Remote work is reshaping the risk
Dr Lim pointed to a further complication: the psychosocial cost of distributed teams. Drawing on Clearhead's internal data across the hundreds of companies it works with, she said social isolation linked to remote work has climbed steadily over the past three years, eroding the workplace culture and trust that once made it easier to raise concerns or deliver feedback in person.
"If I don't have that relationship with you, that's usually easier to build in person – you might take that as, why is she criticising me?" Dr Lim said. "So suddenly that constructive feedback for growth becomes perceived as bullying."
What employers should do before October
Dr Lim recommends employers move to quarterly, rather than annual, psychosocial risk assessments, using tools lightweight enough to sustain genuine engagement while giving leadership real-time visibility rather than a once-a-year snapshot.
Shawn Minnie, health and safety manager at property services firm Barfoot & Thompson, said the shift to more frequent data has already changed how leadership approaches wellbeing.
"Before Clearhead, we were working off annual data that was already outdated by the time we acted on it. Having real-time monthly visibility has fundamentally changed how our leadership team approaches wellbeing. We're planning ahead instead of reacting," Minnie said.
With the October deadline approaching, Dr Lim's core message to HR leaders is to establish, urgently, whether they currently have visibility into psychosocial hazards at all – and to escalate the gap to leadership if they don't.
