BEHAVIOUR AT WORK
THE HUMAN FACTOR
Joe White, employee safety solution architect at DuPont Sustainable Solutions, explores the ‘why’ behind risky behaviour in the workplace.
Despite stringent regulations, advanced process automation, safety management systems, and the well-intentioned efforts around investigations, work accidents still happen, and in some cases are repeated in a similar fashion. Why? Because humans aren’t perfect.
Facilities are not simply operated by humans; they are also designed, built and maintained by them. This provides ample opportunity for people to contribute to incidents. Fully understanding the many roles humans play at facilities and the factors that influence their decision-making are therefore vital to preventing incidents.
But the individual is hardly ever solely responsible and the incident is hardly ever isolated. The key to effectively preventing incidents comes from gaining a comprehensive understanding of their root causes and addressing them holistically.
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What is evident from a review of incident reports is a long history of the significant role of human factors in causing incidents. The phrase “human factors” is often used to describe the interaction of individuals with each other, with equipment and facilities, and with management systems. It is also used to describe how such interactions are influenced by a work environment and culture.
Understanding and improving “human factors” in causing incidents requires a focus on people’s inherent behaviours, characteristics, needs, abilities and limitations, as well as the development of sustainable and safe working cultures.
In order to achieve a step change in safety, we have to therefore go beyond the traditional safety management approach. Much at-risk behaviour occurs automatically and intuitively and is the result of experience-
based feelings associated with anticipated outcomes. The key to advancing the effectiveness of safety management practices involves a better understanding of motivational factors and their subsequent impact on decision-making.
THE ROOTS Organisations should clearly establish and effectively convey expectations regarding behaviour in the workplace. Secondly, a process should be put in place to monitor actions to ensure conformance with standardised work practices. Finally, feedback must be used to reinforce or modify behaviours.
But the number of resources and time available to most companies for this has diminished over the past 10 to 20 years, which has reduced the feedback process. The effectiveness of this model, when executed as a line function, is further strained when applied to remote, distributed, or
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