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Thursday morning, conference room of a metal-processing plant in Joliette. The HR director sets a forty-page report on the table — generated automatically by the survey platform. Response rate: 61%. She sent the questionnaire in good faith, followed up twice, thanked participants. The operations director looks at her. The OHS committee representative waits. Nobody knows where to begin. The report states that workload is “high” in the assembly sector, that recognition is “low” in the shipping sector, and that supervisor support varies “significantly” from one shift to the next. These are facts. They are not yet actions. And without documented actions, they are not compliance either.
What a forty-page report cannot do on its own
Quebec’s Law 27 (the amendment to the Act respecting occupational health and safety, in force in stages since 2022) requires employers to identify psychosocial risks, assess them, and put prevention measures in place as part of their prevention program or action plan. Data collection is the first step, not the finish line. Yet most SMEs that launched a first survey in 2024 or 2025 stop right there: they have the data, they don’t have the rest. That is not a criticism — it is a missing structure.
The cost of this blind spot is twofold. On one side, the organisation does not know what to prioritise: when everything comes back as “concerning,” nothing moves. On the other side, the report now exists in the company’s files. If a worker files a complaint or an incident occurs, that document becomes part of the record. It will show that the employer knew — or should have known — that workload was high in the assembly sector. Good intentions, without a documented follow-through, backfire.
A study by the Institut national de santé publique du Québec, published as part of its research on psychological health at work, notes that recognition and workload consistently rank among the most frequently identified risk factors in Quebec manufacturing environments. That finding is no surprise in the Joliette report. It is precisely why an action plan must name specific steps, identified responsible parties, and real deadlines — not general directions.
What should remain after the survey
An action plan that can stand up before an OHS committee answers four simple questions: which risk, in which sector, who does what, by which date. At the Joliette plant, that could have looked like this: the overload in the assembly sector prompts a pace-review meeting with the operations director within sixty days; the findings on supervisor support trigger a half-day training session for night-shift team leads, attested and filed in the OHS record. These are not ambitious projects. They are a paper trail.
The most honest objection you hear in that moment is: “If we document everything, we expose ourselves further.” That is a legitimate concern, and it deserves a straight answer. Not documenting does not erase the risk — the forty-page report is already there. What protects the employer is proving that it acted reasonably after identifying the risk. Documenting the plan is not an admission of wrongdoing; it is the only evidence that due diligence followed the data collection.
The survey serves another function that often goes unappreciated: it sends a signal to employees. Sixty-one percent took the time to respond. They are waiting to see what will change. When nothing comes, the next response rate will be thirty percent — and that silence will itself be a result.
CSS Consult supports SMEs in exactly the step that comes after the survey: turning data into a documented action plan that is defensible and traceable. The real question — the one that remains once the report is on the table — is this: if a CNESST (Quebec’s workplace health and safety authority) inspector asks what you did with your results, what can you show them today?
What gets measured gets prevented. What gets proven remains.