High job demands:

• means high levels of physical, mental or emotional effort are needed to do the job
• is more than sometimes ‘being a little busy’. High job demands become a hazard when severe, prolonged/long term, or it happens often
• includes working long hours, without a break or to unreasonable deadlines, doing physically tiring tasks, not having the right training or skills for the tasks, or having to be friendly to difficult customers. It can also include unrealistic expectations about being available/responsive outside work hours or while on holidays.

Low job demands:

• means sustained low levels of physical, mental or emotional effort are needed to do the job
• is more than just having an occasional slow afternoon. Low job demands become a hazard when severe, prolonged/long term, or it happens often
• includes long idle periods, particularly if workers can’t do other tasks (for example while waiting for supplies or repairs) and highly monotonous or repetitive tasks (for example packing products). They may be doing tasks below theirs skills, which mans they lose those competencies.

A job may have a combination of low and high demands.

Identify and assess the risks

To learn if there are high or low job demands in your workplace (or the potential for them) look at everything from the work environment to work tasks, how they’re carried out, and the way work is designed and managed.

• Consult your workers. They may tell you they feel stressed, burnt out, worried or unmotivated. They may raise concerns about the workload, tasks or timeframes. Talk with your health and safety reps and committee too.
• Observe work and behaviours. Workers rushing or making a lot of mistakes may indicate job demands are too high.
• Review information such as overtime records, time off, injuries, incidents and near misses, and workers compensation claims.
• Use surveys and tools. If you have more than 20 workers may find the People at Work psychosocial risk assessment tool useful. Head4Work is suitable if you have 20 or less workers (see Psychosocial hazards resources).
• Have a way for workers to report their concerns, and treat these seriously and respectfully. That will encourage reporting and help you fix the problem.
• Identify other hazards present and consider them together. Hazards can interact and combine to create new, changed or higher risks. For example, high workloads may create a higher safety risk if workers can’t take breaks, don’t have the right tools to do the job or workplace relationship are poor.
• Consider how long, how often and how severely workers are exposed to hazards. The longer, more often and worse the exposure to high or low job demands, the higher the risk that workers may be harmed.

Practical control measures

Here are some ideas for control measure that can help you prevent and manage high or low job demands.

Review your control measures

You must review your control measures to check they are working as planned. If your control measures aren’t managing the job demands or is creating new risks, you must make changes.

Get feedback from those affected by the changes, and include them in any modifications to their workplace or work routines. Look at your incident records to see if numbers are going down.