With the People at Work (PAW) survey set to close permanently on 2 October 2026, more than 5000 Australian businesses are about to lose the free tool they have relied on to track psychosocial risk in their workforce, and the timing could not be worse for an industry built on shift work, lone working and high staff turnover.
Jointly developed by Safe Work Australia and state and territory regulators, PAW has been used by more than 160,000 individual workers since its 2020 launch, giving employers a standardised way to measure factors such as job demands, role clarity and exposure to harassment. Businesses have already lost the ability to launch new surveys on the platform since July, and a new whitepaper from mental health and wellbeing provider Clearhead warns that regulators have no plans to replace it, even as Work Health and Safety (WHS) laws increasingly require employers to actively monitor psychosocial risk rather than simply record it after something goes wrong.
For cleaning and facilities management operators, whose workforces are frequently dispersed across sites, working unsociable hours and often invisible to head office, that monitoring gap is more than a paperwork problem. It is a frontline one. Cleaners and FM staff regularly work alone, out of hours and in client environments where support structures are thin, conditions that WHS regulators have repeatedly flagged as heightening psychosocial risk. Newer hazards captured in recent regulatory updates, including remote work and sexual harassment risks, were never properly reflected in PAW, a survey originally developed in 2007 and now showing its age.
Liability now reaches well past the boardroom
The most significant change buried in this story is not the loss of a survey tool itself but how far personal liability has spread. 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, meaning the person signing off on a psychosocial risk plan can be held personally responsible for its failure.
In the Human Resources Director report that prompted this piece, Dr Angela Lim, quoted the exposure in stark terms. Where there is repeated identification of a hazard that officers have ignored, and it contributes to someone attempting or committing suicide, gross negligence can carry a personal fine of up to $2.3 million and up to 10 years in jail, with some jurisdictions able to pursue industrial manslaughter charges carrying sentences of up to 25 years. For an industry where frontline supervisors often double as the de facto welfare check for a scattered workforce, that liability is not abstract.
What replaces a government tool built for the job
Employers now need to establish their own systems for identifying, monitoring and acting on psychosocial hazards before PAW disappears in October, and cleaning and FM businesses without an internal HR function are especially exposed.
Cleaning contractors already juggling award compliance, high turnover and thin margins may be tempted to treat this as one more compliance box to tick, which understates the risk considerably. Psychosocial hazards in this industry are structural rather than incidental, built into rosters that isolate workers, client sites where harassment can go unwitnessed and a culture in which raising a welfare concern can feel like admitting the business is understaffed. A survey closing is a prompt to build something more durable than the tool it replaces, not simply a deadline to meet.
Building a system before the deadline hits
Operators that act now have the advantage of time, however limited it is. Reviewing current WHS documentation against the psychosocial hazards regulators have flagged in recent years, establishing a clear escalation path for site supervisors who notice a problem and briefing management on where personal liability now sits are practical starting points that do not require an enterprise-grade platform to implement.
The disappearance of PAW should not be read as regulators loosening their expectations. It is the opposite. Employers are now expected to run psychosocial risk management as a continuous discipline rather than an annual survey, and the businesses that treat this change seriously now will be far better placed than those still searching for a replacement tool after October.
