Can COPSOQ III Replace People at Work? A Practical Answer for Australian Employers

With the People at Work (PAW) survey being decommissioned, the employers and consultants who relied on it are asking the obvious question: what comes next? The instrument named most often as the successor is the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire, COPSOQ III.

The short answer is yes, COPSOQ III can serve as the measurement foundation that replaces PAW. But only if it sits inside a proper Australian risk-management process. It is a measurement instrument, not compliance in a box, and that distinction is the whole point.

Why PAW is closing

PAW was developed by Safe Work Australia and the state and territory WHS regulators and launched in 2020. It has been the primary government-endorsed psychosocial risk assessment tool in Australia since. It is now being decommissioned nationally: new surveys can no longer be launched after 1 July 2026, and the platform closes on 2 October 2026, after which organisational data is removed and cannot be recovered.

Regulators have been candid about why. PAW would need modification to adequately cover hazards such as sexual harassment and isolated or remote work; response rates had declined, reducing the reliability of results; and newer, shorter instruments now do the measurement job with less survey fatigue. Rebuilding PAW was judged not to be the best use of public resources.

The important point for duty holders: the obligation to manage psychosocial risk does not go anywhere. Only the free government tool does. If you have historical PAW data, export your reports before the platform closes, because raw data will not be recoverable afterward.

What COPSOQ III is

COPSOQ III is an internationally established, validated questionnaire for measuring the psychosocial work environment. It covers a broad set of constructs, including quantitative and emotional demands, influence and control, possibilities for development, predictability, recognition, role clarity and role conflict, quality of leadership, organisational justice, social support, workplace community, work-life conflict and job insecurity, along with outcomes such as burnout, stress and general health, and offensive behaviours including bullying and unwanted sexual attention. It is modular, with short, middle and long versions.

Critically for Australian use, COPSOQ III now has local validation. A 2025 study published in BMC Public Health (Rahimi, Arnold, LaMontagne and Riley) tested the long version in a random sample of 2,446 working Australians, found strong reliability across the great majority of its measures, and established Australian population benchmarks for use in workplace risk assessment and management. That gives it a defensibility in the Australian context that an imported employee-engagement survey simply does not have.

The distinction that matters

Here is the point most easily missed. A validated survey is not the same as a compliant risk assessment, and it never was, PAW included.

COPSOQ III is a measurement instrument. It is not organised around the hazard labels used in Australia's codes of practice, and it does not map one-to-one onto every hazard those codes require an employer to consider. The Commonwealth's Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work Code of Practice 2024 identifies 17 hazards; state codes based on the model code identify their own set. Some categories, such as remote or isolated work, exposure to traumatic content, intrusive surveillance, violence and aggression, and sexual harassment in operational detail, may need supplementary questions alongside the core COPSOQ scales. And no survey, however good, identifies every hazard or explains its cause on its own.

So the honest framing is not "PAW was compliant and COPSOQ is not." It is this: neither instrument should be assumed to cover every current regulatory hazard without a coverage review, and a survey is one input to a risk-management process, not the process itself.

What a defensible COPSOQ-based approach looks like

Replacing PAW well means building the process around the instrument, not treating the survey report as the assessment:

1. The validated COPSOQ III core survey, with its scales and scoring preserved and, where available, Australian benchmarks applied.
2. An Australian hazard-alignment layer: clearly separated supplementary questions covering the hazards required by the applicable state, territory or Commonwealth code but not adequately represented in COPSOQ.
3. Other identification methods: consultation, facilitated workshops, and existing signals such as incident and grievance records, workers' compensation data, absenteeism, turnover and exit interviews. A survey is a starting point, not the whole picture.
4. Risk assessment: where exposure occurs, which workgroups are affected, how often, how severe the potential harm is, and how hazards combine.
5. Control planning aimed at the design of work, workload, staffing, systems, supervision, role clarity and organisational practice, not simply wellbeing training or employee-assistance referrals.
6. Review: repeating measurement and checking whether the controls actually changed exposure, not only whether wellbeing scores moved.

The bottom line

For Australian employers, the accurate proposition is not "run COPSOQ and you are compliant." It is: use COPSOQ III as a validated measurement foundation, add an Australian hazard-alignment layer, and wrap both in a structured, evidence-generating risk-management workflow. Measurement and compliance are two different things, and the gap between them is exactly where the real work sits.

That is how we think about it at PsychProof. COPSOQ III is the measurement engine. PsychProof is the Australian psychosocial risk-management system built around it, capturing the consultation, the hazard mapping, the controls and the evidence of review that turn a survey result into a defensible record. If your organisation is planning the transition from PAW, our PAW decommissioning guide sets out the key dates and export steps.

This article is provided for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. Regulatory details are sourced from official communications by Comcare, WorkSafe Queensland, SafeWork SA and Safe Work Australia, current as at July 2026.