People at Work is closing: what it means and what to do next

If your business leaned on the People at Work survey to assess psychosocial risk, you have a change to plan for. The platform is being retired on a published timeline through 2026, and the first of its deadlines has already passed. The good news, and the part that matters most, is that the legal duty underneath the survey has not changed at all. What changes is the tool you used to do part of the work, not the work itself.

This guide explains what is happening, what does and does not change for you, and a practical path to keep meeting the duty once People at Work is gone. It is written for an employer who is learning these terms, not for a safety professional, and it is decision-support context rather than legal advice.

The dates that matter

People at Work is closing in stages, and the stages have hard dates. As of early June 2026, the first has already passed.

1. New registrations closed on 1 June 2026. If you had not registered before then, you can no longer sign up to run a new survey through the platform.
2. New surveys close on 1 July 2026. After that date, you will not be able to launch a fresh survey through People at Work.
3. The platform closes on 2 October 2026. That is the end point for the tool itself.

The practical reading is straightforward. The window to start anything new on People at Work has effectively closed, and the window to finish anything in progress and get your data out runs to the platform close in October. If you have results, reports, or raw data sitting in People at Work that you will want later, the sensible move is to retrieve and store your own copy well before October rather than at the last minute. Records you are relying on for your risk-management process should not live only inside a platform that is being switched off.

What does not change: the duty

Here is the part worth being clear about. People at Work was a survey instrument. It helped employers measure psychosocial risk. It was never the legal duty, and retiring it does not retire the duty.

Under Australia’s work health and safety laws, an employer has a legal duty to find psychosocial hazards, assess the risk they create, do what is reasonably practicable to control them, consult workers along the way, and review whether the controls are working. That duty applies to psychological safety the same way it has long applied to physical safety, and it is continuous: a loop of identify, assess, control, consult, and review that keeps running as the work and the workforce change. None of that depends on any one tool. If anything, the regulatory direction has been toward more attention on psychosocial risk, not less. Victoria’s psychological health regulations commenced on 1 December 2025, extending psychosocial work health and safety regulation further across the country.

So an employer who relied on People at Work for the assessment step still needs a way to do all of it: identify the hazards that genuinely apply to the workplace, assess which are serious, decide and apply controls, consult workers, and keep an organised, retrievable record of the lot. Losing the free survey tool removes one convenient way to do the measuring. It does not remove the obligation to measure, act, and record.

What you actually used People at Work for

It helps to separate what the tool did from what you still need. For most employers, People at Work covered the survey-and-measure slice: a validated questionnaire, responses gathered, and a report describing where psychosocial risk sat across the workforce. That is genuinely useful, and it is the part you now need to replace.

But the survey was only ever the front end. The duty does not stop at a report. Once you know where the risks are, you are expected to choose controls, and to look first at higher-order controls that change how the work is designed and managed rather than relying on an Employee Assistance Program or a wellbeing app to do a job that work redesign should be doing. You are expected to consult workers about the hazards that affect them and the measures you propose. You are expected to track who is doing what by when, and to keep evidence it was done. And you are expected to keep all of it as a maintained record you could show an inspector, an insurer, or your own board.

People at Work helped with the measuring. The controls, the consultation, the action tracking, the leadership reporting, and the maintained evidence pack were always your responsibility, tool or no tool. So as you replace the survey, it is worth deciding whether you want to replace just the measuring step or pick up something that carries the whole loop.

What to look for in whatever comes next

Several survey tools and managed services are positioning themselves as the answer for departing People at Work users. As you weigh them up, a short checklist helps separate a genuine replacement from a survey with a new name.

1. Does it cover the whole loop, or just the survey? A tool that produces results but no controls, consultation, tracking, or review leaves you with the hardest parts still to do. The survey is the easy bit. The defensible record is the work.
2. Does it produce a maintained record, or a one-off report? The duty is ongoing, so a report that lands once and then ages is not enough. Ask whether the action tracker and the evidence pack stay current.
3. Can you get your data out? You are about to learn this lesson with People at Work. Ask any new provider how you retrieve and keep your own copy of your records, so you are never trapped again if a platform changes.
4. Is the documentation built to be read by an outsider? The real test of a record is whether an inspector, an insurer, or a board member could pick it up and follow what you did. Ask to see a sample.
5. Is it honest about its limits? A credible provider will tell you it supports your duty rather than discharging it, and will point you to your own legal adviser for contested questions. Treat compliance guarantees as a warning sign, not a feature.
6. Does it suit your size? A small or medium employer with no in-house safety or HR specialist needs something that works without a safety department behind it.

A note on timing, because two things are pushing employers to decide now. The People at Work deadlines above mean the gap is immediate rather than hypothetical: the registration window has already closed, and the survey and platform closes follow this year. And the broader regulatory picture, with psychosocial WHS regulation extended further across the country from 1 December 2025, means the duty is firmly in place while the familiar free tool is on its way out. That combination is exactly why this is worth sorting deliberately rather than leaving until October.

Where PsychSecure fits

PsychSecure is a managed service that supports employers to implement and maintain their psychosocial risk-management workflow and to create defensible documentation aligned with applicable WHS guidance. For an employer leaving People at Work, it is built to pick up the whole loop, not just the survey: it helps you map the hazards against your own evidence, grade your existing controls as adequate, partial, or absent, build a prioritised plan with named owners and review points, and keep the consultation records, the action tracking, the leadership reporting, and the evidence pack in one maintained record designed to drop into your due-diligence file. Its eyebrow says it simply: assess, control, respond.

To be clear about what it is and is not. PsychSecure is decision-support and workflow automation. It does not provide legal advice. It is not a clinical diagnostic tool. And it does not by itself make your organisation compliant. The primary duty stays with you as the employer. What the service is designed to do is help you keep meeting that duty after People at Work retires, and to evidence that you took it seriously, in a form that holds up. Where you want outside assurance, you can engage your own suitably qualified adviser to review it.

A note on what this is and is not

This guide is general information to help Australian employers understand what the People at Work closure means for their psychosocial risk-management duty. It is not legal, clinical, or work health and safety advice, and it does not guarantee any compliance or regulatory outcome. The way the duty applies depends on your own circumstances and the rules in your state, and genuinely contested or higher-stakes questions warrant your own qualified adviser. The dates above are as we understand the published People at Work decommissioning timeline; confirm anything that matters for your business against the current information from the relevant authority.

A next step, if it is useful

If People at Work was how you ran this and you would rather not rebuild the whole process on your own, you are welcome to a short call, usually 15 to 20 minutes. We will walk through what a maintained, defensible record looks like for an organisation like yours once the survey tool is gone, show you a sample, and answer your questions, with no pressure either way. If you were simply trying to work out what the shutdown means and what your options are, then the short version is this: the tool is closing, the duty is not, and there are sensible ways to keep going.