Sole traders and small business owners

Identifying psychosocial hazards may help you think through how you can best manage risks to your mental health. Often you will already be managing these hazards as part of good business management. For example:

  • planning for busy periods and moving non-essential work to quieter times will also reduce the risks of high work demand 
  • keeping minimal cash at the workplace and displaying signs advising of that will also minimise the risk of violence, and
  • having the right tools to do common tasks will also minimise the risk poor support.

Where you are already doing things that manage the risk you don’t need to set up a separate WHS process. However, using the WHS risk management process might help you find things you hadn’t thought of. 

There are also a number of non-WHS resources which may be useful:

Where you are doing work for another business (e.g. as a subcontractor) they will have duties to you as a worker and must ensure your health and safety so far as is reasonably practicable. See WHS duties in a contractual chain: Factsheet.