Victoria’s Psychosocial Health Regulations, which took effect on 1 December 2025, bring the state into line with the rest of Australia in recognising psychological health and safety as a core workplace obligation.
For contact centres, environments characterised by high call volumes, emotionally charged interactions, rigid KPIs and unpredictable workloads, the implications are significant. When these pressures are not actively designed and managed, they do not just impact performance. They create real, foreseeable psychological risk for the people doing the work.
What has changed is the lens through which work is assessed. Psychological health is no longer viewed as an individual resilience issue or a standalone HR initiative. In contact centres, it is increasingly recognised for what it truly is: a function of workload, work design and operational decision making.
So, what does this mean in practice, and how can Workforce Management help?
Psychosocial Risk Lives in Operations
For years, organisations have responded to psychosocial risk with wellbeing programs, training and support services. These initiatives matter, but they rarely address the root causes of stress in contact centres.
The most common psychosocial hazards include:
- High job demands
- Low job control
- Exposure to aggression
- Fatigue and burnout
- Remote or isolated work
- Perceptions of unfairness
- Insufficient support from leaders
These hazards stem from how work is forecast, scheduled, managed and adjusted in real time. Addressing them requires more than policy. It requires tools and processes that improve workload fairness, predictability, stability and support across every operating hour.
What the Regulations are Really Asking
Strip away the legal language and the expectation is clear.
If workload related harm is foreseeable, measurable and ongoing, it must be actively managed.
In practice:
- Predictable demand must be planned for
- Constrained capacity must result in adjusted expectations
- Increased pressure must be met with increased controls
This is not about eliminating pressure altogether. It is about designing work so pressure is reasonable, predictable and sustainable.
In contact centres, the levers that control this sit squarely with Operations and Workforce Management.
Workforce Management as a Psychosocial Risk Control
Under the psychosocial regulations, organisations are expected to apply the hierarchy of control. This includes eliminating risk where reasonably practicable, designing systems of work that minimise exposure, and actively managing risk as it emerges.
In a contact centre, forecasts, schedules and intraday decisions are no longer neutral operational outputs. They are psychosocial risk controls.
This is where Call Design’s Workforce Optimisation Cloud approach (supported by Aspect WFM, Intradiem, CallD.AI and ProHance) provides a practical, regulator aligned framework for managing risk across the entire system of work.
Aspect WFM: Designing Work to Prevent Harm
Aspect Workforce Management provides the foundation for psychosocial risk control by stabilising workload before the day begins.
Through accurate forecasting, realistic shrinkage based on actuals, and schedules designed with equity and fatigue in mind, Aspect WFM enables organisations to:
- Prevent chronic overload caused by under forecasting
- Design shifts that allow for recovery
- Improve fairness and predictability across teams
- Align service expectations with actual capacity
From a regulatory perspective, this is the most effective control available: designing work so psychological harm is less likely to occur in the first place.
But even the best plans can be disrupted by reality: outages, spikes, absenteeism and volatility. That’s where real-time control becomes essential.
Intradiem: Managing Psychosocial Risk as it Emerges
Running across all operating hours, Intradiem operates at the point where psychosocial risk often peaks during the day.
It delivers automated, real time operational intelligence that dynamically manages workload, schedules, breaks and engagement, acting directly on the systems of work rather than relying on manual intervention.
This aligns with the regulator’s expectation to control psychosocial risk at its source.
Intradiem helps reduce psychosocial risk by:
- Delivering timely break prompts and voluntary time off
- Preventing shift overruns and prolonged exposure to high pressure queues
- Automating intraday adjustments using predefined rules
- Standardising decision making and reducing disruption
The impact is lower fatigue, improved job control, greater predictability and reduced managerial firefighting, allowing leaders to focus on coaching and support.
CallD.AI: Eliminating Risk Before it Reaches the Frontline
In the hierarchy of control, elimination is the strongest protection.
In contact centres, a significant portion of psychosocial risk is driven by avoidable inbound contacts, surge demand and long wait times that escalate customer frustration and aggression.
CallD.AI eliminates part of this risk before work ever reaches a human agent.
By using conversational AI to handle specific contact types and absorb surge demand, CallD.AI:
- Reduces overall workload volume
- Smooths demand peaks
- Shortens queue times
- Lowers exposure to customer aggression
This is risk elimination at source. It is not automation for efficiency’s sake, but deliberate workload reduction to protect psychological health. Importantly, it allows people to focus on complex, meaningful work in more controlled conditions.
ProHance: Making Invisible Work Visible
Psychosocial risk does not stop at the phones.
Back office and blended environments often carry hidden risk, including unmeasured workload, constant task switching and limited visibility for leaders.
ProHance provides operational visibility across back office and non-voice work, enabling organisations to understand how work is actually performed.
By analysing task load, utilisation and process friction, ProHance supports:
- Fairer workload distribution
- Improved role clarity
- Reduced cognitive overload
- Evidence based resourcing decisions
From a psychosocial safety perspective, visibility is not about surveillance. It is about designing work that is achievable, fair and sustainable.
Think of ProHance as a Fitbit for your back office workforce, providing objective insight so leaders can intervene early and design healthier systems of work.
Why this Matters Under the New Regulations
The psychosocial regulations require organisations to demonstrate active, system level risk control, not just awareness or intent.
This is where Call Design’s Workforce Optimisation Cloud Solution enables organisations to:
- Eliminate psychosocial risk where reasonably practicable
- Design fair, predictable and sustainable workloads
- Actively manage pressure in real time
- Support contact centre, back office and hybrid teams consistently
- Enable leaders to lead rather than firefight
- Evidence compliance through operational data, not paperwork
This aligns directly with the hierarchy of control embedded in Victoria’s framework and the national Work Health and Safety (WHS) approach.
The Bottom Line
Victoria’s Psychosocial Health Regulations mark a turning point for contact centres.
This is no longer about layering wellbeing initiatives on top of broken work design. It is about redesigning how work is organised across the entire operation.
When workload is eliminated where possible, designed fairly from the outset, actively managed in real time and made visible across all work types, psychosocial risk reduces and performance improves.
At Call Design, this is exactly where we focus. Helping organisations design work that works for their people and their customers.
Written by Julie-Anne Hazlett
