The People at Work survey platform is being permanently decommissioned. Registrations for new organisations closed on 1 June 2026, the last surveys had to launch by 1 July, and on 2 October the platform shuts down and organisational data is removed.

Around 5,000 Australian businesses used it, covering more than 160,000 workers. If you were one of them, you have two jobs before October. Export what you have, and work out what replaces it.

The second job is the one worth thinking about properly, because the reasons the platform is being retired say something useful about how psychosocial risk assessment has been done in this country, and why a survey once a year was never quite enough.

First, export your reports

Only the reports generated by the platform can be extracted. Raw survey data is not available for download, and everything else is deleted when the platform closes.

If your People at Work reports form part of how you would demonstrate that you assessed psychosocial risk, they currently exist in one place and that place is closing. The Queensland Office of Industrial Relations has published guidance on exporting. Do it this month rather than in late September, when everyone else will be doing the same thing.

While you are at it, note what you cannot take with you. Your response-level data goes. Your ability to compare this year against last year goes. Whatever benchmarking you had against other organisations goes. That loss is worth sitting with for a moment, because it points at something about how the record was being kept.

Nothing about your duty has changed

Worth stating plainly, because it is the first question most employers ask. Regulators have been explicit that removing the platform does not reduce anyone's obligations. The psychosocial provisions in WHS regulations across Australian states and territories are unchanged. What has gone away is a free tool many employers used to meet them, not the requirement itself.

If anything, the guidance accompanying the closure has been clearer than usual on one point: managing psychosocial risk is an ongoing duty, not a one-off activity or a single survey event.

Why the platform is being retired

Three reasons have been given, and each of them is instructive.

Coverage. The tool needed modification to fully address the hazards described in the Model Code of Practice, particularly sexual harassment and isolated or remote work. That is not a small gap. It is also a structural problem rather than a fixable one, because a periodic survey is a poor instrument for catching either. Harassment does not wait for the survey window, and a worker who is isolated is precisely the worker least likely to be captured in an organisation-wide snapshot.

Response rates. Recent survey cycles showed declining engagement. This is the quiet problem with long instruments. A 60-item survey is more rigorous than a short one in theory, and considerably less rigorous in practice when only a third of your workforce finishes it. The people who drop out are not a random sample either. The most overloaded, most disengaged and most at-risk employees are the least likely to spend twenty minutes on a questionnaire about how overloaded and disengaged they feel.

It had been overtaken. The research and the regulatory framework moved on from where the tool was built.

None of that is a criticism of People at Work, which did useful work for a decade and was free, which is more than most of the market managed. But taken together, the three reasons describe the limits of the annual survey model itself rather than the limits of one particular survey.

The problem with once a year

Think about what an annual assessment actually produces.

It gives you one data point per year. If something changes in March, you find out in November, assuming the person it affected is still there to tell you. Most of the time they are not, because the average tenure of a genuinely unhappy employee is shorter than your survey cycle.

It gives you no sense of frequency. A hazard identified once looks the same in your report as a hazard occurring every week. Those are different risks requiring different responses, and a snapshot cannot tell them apart.

It gives you no trend. You cannot see whether the workload problem in operations is getting worse or resolving itself, only that it was present on the day you asked.

And it produces a document rather than a record. This is the part that matters most, and it is the part employers usually discover at the worst possible moment. A report tells you what you found. It does not tell you what you did about it. When someone asks you to account for a psychosocial hazard, and eventually someone will, the question is never just whether you knew. It is what happened next.

The awkward truth about a filed survey report is that it is evidence you identified a problem. On its own, with no record of the response, that is not obviously better than never having asked.

What continuous assessment looks like

The alternative is not a longer survey. It is a shorter one, more often.

A check-in that takes under a minute gets completed by most of the workforce rather than a third of it. Run fortnightly or monthly, it produces twenty or more data points a year instead of one. That is enough to see which hazards are present, how often they occur, which teams they cluster in, and whether they are improving.

Pair that with a channel people can use at any time, not only when a survey is open, and the hazards that periodic instruments miss start showing up: harassment when it happens, isolated workers when they are struggling, the problem that emerges three weeks after the annual survey closed.

Then log the response. Every hazard identified, the action taken, the outcome, with a date attached. That is the difference between a report and a risk register, and it is the thing that answers the question you will actually be asked.

Individually, a short check-in is not an assessment. It is one data point. The assessment is what accumulates: the pattern across weeks and months, at the organisational level, which is the level your duty applies at anyway.

What to do between now and October

Export your reports. This month, not next.

Decide what replaces it. Whether that is another platform, a consultant engagement or something you run internally, the gap between October and whenever you next assess is a gap in your record.

Write down what you did about last year's findings. If your People at Work results identified hazards and you acted on them, that action is probably documented nowhere. Reconstructing it now, while people still remember, is worth an afternoon.

Set a cadence rather than a date. The single most useful change most employers can make is moving from an annual event to a continuous one. It is also the change the regulators have been signalling for a while.

HowsWork is a continuous psychosocial risk assessment platform for Australian employers. Anonymous check-ins and concern reports feed a risk register that records every hazard and the action taken. Request a demo.