People at Work is closing on 2 October 2026: Here's what your organisation needs to do next

On 2 October 2026, SafeWork Australia and the state regulators will decommission the People at Work (PAW) survey — the free, government-provided psychosocial-risk assessment tool that thousands of Australian organisations have leaned on to meet their duties under the SafeWork NSW Code of Practice, the Victorian Psychological Health Regulations, and every other state instrument that mirrors them.

Twelve weeks isn't a long runway. If your organisation has been using PAW to check the box on psychosocial risk, three things need to happen fast.

First — the compliance obligation isn't going away.

Losing PAW doesn't lose the requirement. The SafeWork NSW Code of Practice: Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work (2022) and the Victorian Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations (2025) both remain in force.

Every Australian employer with a duty under those instruments is still expected to identify, assess, and control the 14 listed psychosocial hazards — document what they've done, and produce evidence on request from the regulator, an insurer, or a court.

Which means the moment PAW goes dark, you're back to square one on the "what tool are we using?" question — and unless a replacement is in place, your compliance evidence base will freeze on your last PAW report and slowly become stale.

Second — extract your historical PAW reports before the platform closes.

SafeWork's reminder email links to a short guide on how to download your PAW reports. Do it now, not the week before the deadline. Your historical psychosocial data has value beyond compliance — it's the baseline any future assessment gets compared against. Losing it because the download link expired would be an unforced error.

If your team hasn't yet, delegate someone this week to:

•       Log into PAW and export every report the organisation has run

•       Save the exports to a secure location with the date range clearly labelled

•       Keep the raw data (not just the summary reports) — the item-level detail is what a

replacement tool can re-read

Third — decide on your replacement now, not in September.

There are three broad paths:

Path 1: Do nothing

Wait until October, hope the regulator doesn't ask, and reassess when someone lodges a complaint. This is the path most likely to end in a Notice from SafeWork and an insurance renewal that reprices your psychosocial-risk premium sharply upward.

Path 2: Build your own.

Contract a research firm or run your own survey with a bespoke instrument. Defensible if done well, but slow (typically 4–6 months to design + pilot + rollout) and expensive (usually $40k–$150k for a single-cycle study, more if you want longitudinal). You also lose the sector-benchmarking that PAW provided for free.

Path 3: Migrate to a purpose-built commercial diagnostic.

Buy a paid tool that maps to the same 14 SafeWork hazards, adds the Vic-specific ones, produces defensible reports, and lets your historical PAW data re-inform the new baseline.

If you go Path 3, here's what to look for:

•       Framework alignment. Does the tool cover all 14 hazards from the NSW Code, plus the 3 Vic-specific additions (gendered violence, identity threat, and cultural blind spots)? PAW covered the 14; a serious replacement should cover 17.

•       Culture-layer decomposition. PAW gave you one aggregate score per hazard. A better tool decomposes each hazard across the three culture layers — Ethos (values and policy), Subcultures (site or department), and Microcultures (team-level) — because that's where cultural pressure actually lives. Without it, you can see the score but not the shape of the problem.

•       Qualitative integration. Surveys catch what people say. They miss what people enact. A defensible modern diagnostic ingests your workshop notes, exit interviews, focus groups and complaints alongside the survey — otherwise you're back to a partial view.

•       Board- and regulator-grade reports. The output has to be a paste-ready PDF, not a spreadsheet you re-format for six hours. If your board pack needs a psychosocial-risk section, that section should be an attachment, not an unwritten paragraph.

•       Audit trail. Every upload, every finding, every export logged. When the regulator asks "when did you know?" — you need a timestamp, not a memory.

Why we built Culture Pressure Map™

Mind Culture Life Australia developed the Culture Pressure Map™ precisely to be the tool the sector needs after PAW winds down. It covers all 14 SafeWork hazards plus the 3 Vic Regs additions (17 total). It decomposes each hazard across the three culture layers. It ingests engagement surveys, focus groups, workshop notes, exit interviews and WHS reports into one CPM-mapped view. It produces a board-grade PDF on demand. It keeps the audit trail. Critically — if you upload your historical PAW report, the CPM Screening reads it through the same framework, so your baseline data isn't lost.

We built it so that the transition from PAW to CPM is a re-read, not a rebuild.

If you'd like to walk through what a migration looks like for your organisation, visit the Culture Pressure Map™ migration page at culturepressuremap.com/migrate-paw or book a 30-minute walkthrough directly with me at info@mindculturelife.com.au.

Twelve weeks is enough time to get this right. But only if you start now.

Dr Anna Kiaos is the founder of Mind Culture Life Australia and the developer of the Culture Pressure Map™ psychosocial-risk diagnostic. She consults to organisations across NSW and Victoria on psychosocial hazard management and culture change.