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Employers need strong policies and programs for psychosocial risk management, but to move from "talking the talk", to "walking the walk", they also need to improve their support for line managers, a workplace psychologist says.

Head Strong Workplaces founder Sam Sellwood is seeing many implementation challenges in workplaces as employers try to navigate the new world of psychosocial regulation, she told the Australian and New Zealand Society of Occupational Medicine's Annual Scientific Meeting this week.

These problems have a "disconnection" theme, she says, and one of them is unclear ownership. Often, different parts of the organisation – "whether it's HR, work health and safety, employee relations or development" – don't know who 'owns' psychosocial risk.

In the worst scenarios, Sellwood says, no one owns the risk, "so different areas are just trying to figure it out and make it up as they go along"...