Psychosocial Risk in Sales and Service Teams
Q&A with Health and Safety Lawyer Grant Nicholson and BlueSkyMinds CEO Debbie Schultz
In this article, I sit down with health and safety lawyer Grant Nicholson to explore how psychosocial risk shows up in real contact centre environments where difficult callers, emotional conversations, verbal abuse, and the pressure to move straight to the next call in the queue are part of daily life.
We discuss:
- Why psychosocial hazards are often invisible in phone-based workplaces
- The cumulative impact of back-to-back difficult customer interactions
- Why EAP support alone isn’t enough to protect frontline teams
- What senior leaders should be doing to design recovery and support into the work
The Experts
Grant Nicholson is a Partner at Anthony Harper and is widely regarded as one of New Zealand’s leading health and safety lawyers. He has extensive experience in all aspects of health and safety law. Grant combines expert technical knowledge with the practical insight gained from many years of experience. including his own early career experience in call centres.
Debbie Schultz is the founder of BlueSkyMinds, specialists in psychosocial risk management for high-demand sales and service teams, where fast-paced work, difficult customer interactions, emotional load, and performance pressure mean traditional wellbeing initiatives often fail to address the real challenges teams face. BlueSkyMinds helps organisations move beyond generic wellbeing by building leader and employee capability and embedding long-term culture change.
Defining a Psychosocial Hazard
Debbie Schultz: Let’s start at the beginning. Many leaders I talk to get ‘psychosocial hazard’ confused with ‘psychological safety’.
Psychological safety is when people feel safe to speak up.
A psychosocial hazard is something different. It refers to aspects of the design or management of work, or the social environment at work, that have the potential to cause psychological or physical harm.
You could have a team that speaks up freely, yet still be exposed to hazards such as high workloads, constant time pressure, or back-to-back difficult customer interactions.
So let’s discuss psychosocial hazards in more detail. How would you describe a psychosocial hazard in plain English? How is a psychosocial hazard similar to, or different from, a physical workplace hazard?
Grant Nicholson: I conceptualise a psychosocial hazard as anything that can impact someone’s mental health and wellbeing. The primary difference is visibility. It’s easy for an organisation to see physical hazards. You can see the press, you can see the machine that doesn’t have guarding. You can see the forklift driving around you. You can see the edge three storeys up on the building, where you could fall off.
Psychosocial hazards are the “invisible part”. It is much harder to see stress, fatigue, or the frustration of someone who lacks autonomy or has unreasonable demands being put on them. People talk about being “worried sick,” and factors like night-shift fatigue ultimately can have a physical impact, even if it isn’t immediately obvious.
I try not to pigeonhole it too much, and just reflect that for me it is the totality of that invisible stuff that can nonetheless land hard and cause impact on people. It may not arise in an immediate physical way, but it can have longer-term physical consequences.
Debbie Schultz: That distinction of invisibility is key. Many leaders still think of stress or mental health as a personal issue that should be left at the door. Interestingly, some organisations have appointed roles such as ‘Head of Psychosocial Risk’, which will help make the invisible visible.
My next question is, at what point does “stress” become a workplace hazard that the employer is legally obligated to manage?
Grant Nicholson: In my view, it always is. It is completely artificial to suggest that whatever is going on in your home life is not going to impact your work today.
If you’ve had a traumatic event at home, say a death in the family or a domestic crisis, you come to work distracted and overwhelmed by things you would usually be robust enough to handle because your defences are weakened.
Organisations make a mistake when they try to pick a single “line” and think they are safe up to that point. Because everyone’s “line” is different and changes daily. Organisations must have processes and a culture that supports self-reporting. You need mature conversations so that the workload can be moderated before the stress rises and becomes unmanageable.
The Window of Tolerance
Debbie Schultz: That resonates deeply with our work. In contact centres, people are often the frontline for highly emotional situations. I’ve seen teams dealing with customers threatening self-harm or being subjected to horrific racial or verbal abuse, like being called the “C-word” 14 times in one call.
We run a programme that focuses on building leader and employee capability to recognise stress responses early and recover effectively after difficult interactions.
We use a well-researched model called the “Window of Tolerance”. It describes a psychological bandwidth. When we are within that window, we can think clearly, regulate emotions, and perform effectively. But if we are pushed outside that window, that is when stress responses start to take over.
We teach teams a quick rating system and simple language so they can tell a leader, “I’m outside my window” when they can’t find the words to describe how they feel. It’s not about being weak or strong or resilient or tough; it’s about acknowledging that your window might be narrower today because of what happened on your last call, combined with what happened last night (for example).
Grant Nicholson: I think that is a really powerful tool. It gets the information out in a non-judgmental and safe way. Many people carry inbuilt guilt or shame about not meeting expectations and don’t want to admit they are struggling. This model gives them a way to witness their own state and communicate it. It also reflects the organisational responsibility to have a process available so managers can respond when told.
Repetition in Customer-Facing Teams
Debbie Schultz: I’ve heard contact centre leaders say that offering generic one-size-fits-all wellbeing initiatives to people whose roles involve repeated exposure to aggressive or emotionally demanding customers can actually be deeply offensive and condescending.
For organisations with large customer-facing teams, how does health and safety law treat repeated exposure to abusive or distressed customers? And at what point does that become something that governing bodies and boards of directors should be actively concerned about?
Grant Nicholson: In sales and service environments, the risk is often not a single catastrophic event. It is repetition: back-to-back calls, week after week. Aggression layered over performance pressure.
It’s exactly the same as a Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI). You wouldn’t ask someone to lift a 120kg box once and expect a shoulder problem; the problem is doing it 100 times a day, five days a week, for three years.
That’s exactly the same analogy as being routinely exposed to distressed customers and personal attacks. Eventually, the cumulative effect of those can become a problem.
You must have a system to filter that strain. Proactive work design means building in recovery time, or decompressing with a team leader after a bad call, rather than forcing the worker to immediately take the next call in the queue.
When exposure is routine, boards and executives should be asking what systems are in place to manage cumulative impact, not just isolated incidents.
Lessons from the Legal Frontline: Wiles v University of Auckland
Debbie Schultz: Looking at the legal landscape, the Siouxsie Wiles v University of Auckland case has been on everyone’s radar. It felt like a clear health and safety failing. What should employers of customer-facing teams take away from this?
Grant Nicholson: The core takeaway is that it is not OK to ignore problems and hope they go away. When you know that someone is exposed to risk because of the work they’re doing, you have obligations under the Health and Safety at Work Act.
In that case, the University empowered Ms Wiles to build a public profile but failed to grapple with the resulting risks. If your work creates a “target” for abuse, your employer has a natural responsibility to keep you safe. An employer cannot simply tell people to “make themselves small” to avoid being a target.
When risk arises from the design of work itself, it does not sit solely within performance management or employment relations. It becomes a health and safety matter.
Support before the harm occurs
Debbie Schultz: A psychosocial hazard is a feature of work that has the potential to cause psychological harm. A psychosocial risk refers to the likelihood and severity of harm occurring when workers are exposed to that hazard.
We often see organisations point to EAP as evidence that they are managing psychosocial risk. From your perspective, is EAP enough on its own to meet an employer’s obligations under health and safety law?
Grant Nicholson: I think EAP serves a purpose, but my honest answer is that EAP is usually the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. The Health and Safety at Work Act says you must eliminate risks first if you can, and otherwise minimise them through a hierarchy of controls. I see EAP support sitting at the lower end of the mitigating risks spectrum. True protection comes from proactive work design, designing roles and recovery systems so people are supported before the harm occurs.
Advice to Senior Leaders
Debbie Schultz: What are the early warning signs you see in organisations that later end up in trouble? From your experience, what do organisations usually get wrong before harm escalates?
Grant Nicholson: I see a lot of what I’d call victim-blaming in New Zealand, the ‘harden up, buttercup’ attitude. Leaders sometimes say, ‘That was just words, the call is done, forget about it,’ as if that somehow makes it better. But something that is objectively ‘less serious’ can significantly affect one person even if another is coping well. Failing to recognise that “different people have different triggers” is a major oversight.
Physical location is also something to be wary of. In a physical office or a branch, there is a shared experience and a wrap-around support that comes from being in a room full of people. If someone is being abused, it’s far more likely that a colleague or a leader will stand up and say, ‘Hey, are you ok? That’s not OK.’
But with the move to remote work in some call centres, we’ve devolved that experience. A major warning sign for me is when a worker is left in isolation at home, dealing with an abusive caller and they don’t feel they have the permission to hang up. When you remove that bystander accountability and the chance for immediate decompression with a peer, the risk of harm is significantly escalated. Isolation is not always a friend of the worker.
Debbie Schultz: I am glad you raised the isolation factor, as it’s something I worry about too. This is something technology may be able to help with. One of the most significant shifts I’m seeing in modern contact centres is the move away from expecting the individual to always “put their hand up” when they’re struggling. We know from experience that many people, especially high performers, often won’t admit they are not coping until it’s too late.
I am hearing about organisations looking at AI sentiment analysis as a proactive safety net. If a customer starts using trigger words, whether it’s the “C-word” or phrases indicating self-harm, the system pings the team leader in real-time. It means the supervisor is aware that something has happened on that call immediately, without the agent having to find the words to report it themselves.
Grant Nicholson: It’s making the invisible visible. It’s bringing some level of objective measurement to something that is otherwise, as I said, sort of tucked away and quiet. And I think that’s a really powerful tool.
The role of capability-building
Debbie Schultz: When managing psychosocial risk like repeated exposure to abusive or distressed customers, what role do capability-building and skills-based interventions play alongside more traditional ‘controls’ like policies or job design?
Grant Nicholson: Skills-based interventions are vital because they build individual strategies and self-awareness. Capability training empowers people to recognise when that cycle has started and helps individuals and leaders recognise those cues early so they can use tools to break the cycle in ‘hour one’ rather than waiting for ‘hour twelve’ to get help.
If organisations can move past the ‘ambulance at the bottom of the cliff’ approach towards capability building, then I think they’re on the right path.
Debbie Schultz: Finally, what would you say to leaders who genuinely care about their people, but feel overwhelmed by the complexity of psychosocial risk? Where is the most effective place to start?
Grant Nicholson: It doesn’t have to be complicated. Guidance can start with managers simply asking their team, “How are you going?”. People knowing that this is a question that can be asked and answered honestly can be incredibly powerful.
The culture pieces about being able to have these mature conversations and for people to be self-reporting… to be able to go, ‘actually, I’m in a bad place today. I don’t want to be doing that work. Can I be doing this work?’ That’s where you start to see the real benefits.
Beyond that, I’d encourage leaders to revisit work design. It’s those pieces about how people interact, the support you provide, and the operational structure you give them. The more organisations can move towards that sophisticated piece rather than generic wellbeing, the more you’re going to see good returns and performance.
If these challenges sound familiar in your organisation, we are here to help.
The MAT programme is designed for sales and service teams, contact centres, and frontline environments where people regularly deal with difficult customer interactions.
Keen to learn more? Click here to sign up, and we will send you a short sample lesson from the programme, including a short video learning module, a snippet from our comprehensive participant workbook, and a sample leader coaching guide.
The best part? The modules can be hosted on your organisation’s learning management system, giving teams 24/7 access and simple progress tracking.