Invest where it will make the biggest difference
When you know what workplace factors are most impacting wellbeing, you can focus time, effort and budget on what will deliver results.
Psychosocial hazard assessment · AS/NZS ISO 45003:2021
Uncover psychosocial hazards, drive performance, reduce risk
Engagement surveys only show how your people feel, not how to improve things. Our independently validated assessment reveals the drivers of psychosocial hazards, so leaders can take action – and manage risks ongoing.
The assessment has been used with
Rolls-Royce EY Suncorp Glencore
Rolls-Royce alone runs the platform across 45,000 employees in six countries.
Hidden risks to psychological safety
You can’t manage psychosocial hazards until you know what they are
Managing your psychosocial hazards is required by law. It also means you’re protecting your people and their productivity.
But to do that, you need to understand the risks facing your workplace. With our assessment, you’ll measure what creates psychological harm – and discover what you can do to reduce it.
49%
of NZ workers reported severe burnout in Q1 2025.
ELMO Employee Sentiment Index, 2025
1 in 5
NZ workers experience workplace bullying or harassment each year.
WorkSafe New Zealand
28%
severe burnout reported in NZ workers in Q4 2024 to Q1 2025.
ELMO Employee Sentiment Index, 2025
One of the most thoroughly evaluated psychosocial assessment instruments available, strong on reliability, validity, ethical design and practical applicability.
Griffith University RISE Research Unit · Independent psychometric validation, April 2025 · n=598
How the assessment works
Your people spend 10 minutes, you measure 24 work factors
The psychosocial hazard assessment is developed by Mibowork and delivered in New Zealand by 3 Big Things. It explores 24 work factors across seven domains, mapping directly to WorkSafe’s Good Practice Guidelines. Most organisations have a board-ready summary and wellbeing benchmarks in just seven weeks.
Roll-out process
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Weeks 1–2
Configure the assessment to your unique environment with guidance from our registered psychologists. You’ll also get comms templates, intranet copy and a launch playbook.
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Weeks 3–5
Have your workforce complete the ten-minute assessment via email, SMS, app or QR code. This can be confidential or fully anonymous and requires no IT integration unless you want SSO.
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Weeks 6–7
Create a plan of action based on your assessment results. Go through your analytics with a registered 3 Big Things psychologist. You’ll know where to act first, what to protect, and what to watch.
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Ongoing
Continue managing hazards from your assessment platform, with a live register for tracking controls, accountability and the effectiveness of your interventions. We help with reassessment cycles, or let you take it from here.
What you’ll measure
The assessment helps you understand your people’s view of the organisation:
- How seriously psychological health is treated at the top
- How workload, role clarity, autonomy, control and support impact psychological wellbeing
- The impact of the work environment, including technology and resources
- The quality of working relationships
- How meaningful they find the work, how success is recognised and how they’re supported to grow
- Their exposure to bullying, harassment and discrimination
- Whether they’ve experienced burnout or distress, and if they intend to leave
Assessment outcomes
Improve compliance and performance, faster
Build workforce performance and retention
Understand what drives absenteeism and turnover, and how to create the conditions where people are engaged and productive.
Demonstrate compliance and due diligence
Prove you’ve assessed psychosocial risk to the WorkSafe standard, with a defensible, evidence-based process.
Aligned with
AS/NZS ISO 45003:2021
The internationally recognised standard for managing psychological health and safety at work.
Why 3 Big Things
Registered psychologists experienced in high-stakes NZ workplaces
Our co-founders and CEOs lead a team of over 40 registered psychologists and specialist staff across Aotearoa. Their expertise across government, healthcare and corporate environments means your assessment is interpreted by people who know New Zealand workplaces and the regulatory context that comes with them.
Sean Versteegh Co-CEO
It's easy to hear the word risk and treat this as compliance, one more box to tick. But building a workplace where people are at their best isn't a compliance task. It's the job.Connect on LinkedIn
Chris Scott Co-CEO
What changes wellbeing at work is not more support. It is fewer reasons to need it.Connect on LinkedIn
40+
The Team Across Aotearoa
More than 40 registered psychologists and specialist staff across Aotearoa, with particular expertise across government, healthcare and corporate environments.
Common questions
What organisations ask us.
What is a psychosocial hazard?
A psychosocial hazard is a feature of how work is designed, organised or managed that can harm someone's mental health, such as excessive workload, unclear roles, poor management, bullying or inadequate recovery time. New Zealand law treats these the same as physical hazards, so they must be identified and managed. A psychosocial hazard assessment measures them across your workforce.
What are our obligations under the Health and Safety at Work Act?
The Act defines health as physical and mental. A PCBU, almost always the organisation itself, must eliminate or minimise risks to both, so far as is reasonably practicable. WorkSafe's Good Practice Guidelines spell out the steps: identify the hazards, assess them, control them, monitor and review. The Act also places a personal due-diligence duty on company officers under section 44. Directors and senior executives must know their hazards, their controls, and how they know those controls are working. A psychosocial hazard assessment is the most direct way to answer that. Once a hazard is reasonably foreseeable, and psychosocial harm clearly is, the duty applies. "We didn't measure it" is not a defence.
What happens if we don't manage psychosocial hazards?
Get it wrong, and the cost is real: turnover, absence, and the people still at their desks who checked out long ago. It increasingly shows up in law as well. In December 2024, Australia recorded its first conviction of a Commonwealth employer for failing to manage psychosocial hazards, on legislation that New Zealand's own law mirrors.
Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, employers must assess and plan before harm is done. The standard a regulator or court will measure you against is NZS ISO 45003. As law firm Buddle Findlay puts it: "It seems only a matter of time before there is a similar prosecution in relation to a failure to manage psychosocial risks in a New Zealand workplace."
What is the return on managing psychosocial hazards well?
Get it right, and performance follows. The work-design choices that reduce psychological harm are the same ones that lift engagement, productivity and retention. People do their best work, and they stay to keep doing it.
This is not a soft return. It's measurable, and it shows up on the numbers a board already watches. Deloitte estimates a return of $4.70 for every dollar invested in workplace mental health.
How much does a psychosocial hazard assessment cost in New Zealand?
A psychosocial hazard assessment costs about $35 per person, with a minimum of $3,000 per organisation. That covers the annual per-seat platform subscription and the one-off implementation in year one, with the 3 Big Things interpretation scoped on top. We'll confirm the exact figure for your workforce on the discovery call.
How long does a psychosocial hazard assessment take?
The assessment takes about ten minutes per person, completed online. The full first cycle, from setup to a board-ready summary, takes about seven weeks. There are no workshops to schedule and no half-days off the floor.
How is a psychosocial hazard assessment different from an engagement survey?
Engagement surveys measure how people feel about work. They don't measure the work-design factors that create or reduce psychological harm, they aren't validated against NZS ISO 45003 or WorkSafe's Guidelines, and they don't quantify the cost. A psychosocial hazard assessment does all three. The two complement each other. One does not replace the other.
Does the assessment quantify financial impact?
Yes. Alongside the work-factor data, the platform estimates the cost of job-stress-related absenteeism, presenteeism and turnover intent, in dollars, for your specific workforce. You can show the board where the pressure sits and what it's likely costing now.
Is the psychosocial hazard assessment confidential, and what does our organisation see?
Individual responses are never shared with your organisation. Reporting back to you is aggregated only, at organisation, department and team level, with minimum response thresholds so individual answers can't be inferred. Trust is everything in this category. The moment it's compromised, the data isn't worth measuring.
How is the psychosocial hazard assessment grounded in Aotearoa New Zealand?
Te Whare Tapa Whā describes wellbeing as a wharenui held up by four walls: taha tinana, taha hinengaro, taha whānau and taha wairua. When one weakens, the whole house feels it.
The assessment works the same way. It doesn't reduce psychological harm to an individual problem. It looks at the environment, the relationships, the design of the work and the meaning people find in it, because risk in any one of those weakens the rest. The results are interpreted by registered psychologists who work in New Zealand workplaces and know the regulatory and cultural context that comes with that.
Who is Mibo, and what is your connection to them?
Mibowork Pty Ltd is the Australian software company that develops the assessment platform, an enterprise provider used by Rolls-Royce, EY, Suncorp, Glencore, the University of Sydney and others. The platform is ISO 27001:2022 certified, hosted on Microsoft Azure with regional data residency, and the survey instrument has been independently evaluated by Griffith University's RISE Research Unit. Your organisation contracts directly with Mibowork for the platform. 3 Big Things delivers the New Zealand implementation, interpretation, clinical layer and ongoing support.
Talk to us
Better compliance and performance starts with uncovering your psychosocial hazards. Let’s talk about yours.
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