Human and organisational factors for safe workplaces

People are involved in all aspects of work and keeping them safe should be a priority for all workplaces.

With this in mind, the Department has developed educational resources on human and organisational factors, otherwise known as HOF. The new online hub aims to promote safe and productive workplaces by educating management and workers on the top ten factors that affect safety and performance.

What is HOF?

The term HOF refers to all elements within a workplace impacting the people who work there. In HOF, these elements generally fall into three categories.

Organisational factors refer to the organisation and its attributes (e.g. organisational priorities, decision-making and strategy, culture of the company or team, availability of resources).

Job factors describe the task and its characteristics (e.g. physical working environment, human-machine interface, workload, task requirements).

Individual factors relate to the person doing the job (e.g. personality, competence and skill, mood, attitude, mental ability, individual health factors).

Managing human and organisational factors is the process of recognising human limitations and capabilities and then designing work and workplaces with these in mind.

Why is HOF important?

Human and organisational factors influence human reliability and performance, contributing to how effectively and safely a worker is able to do their job.

Optimising human and organisational factors reduces the likelihood of error, improve safety performance and help prevent reoccurrence of safety incidents.

Not only will integrating HOF principles improve physical safety, when done well it can: improve productivity; have a positive impact on workplace culture; help develop mentally healthy workplaces.

Human and organisational factors online hub

What is the role of human error in HOF?

When incidents occur, some version of human or user error is often cited as the reason. Human error by itself has little meaning when cited as the cause of an incident. Applying HOF principles enables us to move away from blaming and correcting the individual to looking at the broader context in which the error occurred.

It is not enough to identify a lack of training or limited understanding of what was required by the worker as the root cause. Instead, HOF encourages an unpacking of the incident.

The following questions may help get you started.

Usable procedures: Were the procedures clear? Was there a step missing?

Training and competence: Was the worker’s skillset right for the task? What led to an untrained person being involved in the task?

Safety-critical communication: Were the task requirements communicated clearly and ensured that they were understood?

Health and safety culture: Is there a culture of taking shortcuts in the workplace?

Simply, HOF is about designing workplaces and tasks to reduce the likelihood of human error, and reduce the opportunities for decisions and actions that people take to negatively impact safety.

Integrating human and organisational factors into your safe system of work can help improve physical safety, and have a positive impact on productivity, workplace culture and the development of mentally healthy workplaces.

The Department's top human and organisational factors

Rationale

During the annual Mines Safety Roadshow presented by the then Department of Mines and Petroleum (DMP) in 2015, a workshop was undertaken to identify areas where DMP could assist Western Australian mine sites to improve their safety performance. Improving safety culture was a common response.

Following an assessment of literature and activities being undertaken by other regulators, DMP recognised that human factors would provide a useful framework for managing safety culture.

The DMP review found that, in particular, the UK HSE top 10 human factors framework was relevant to the Western Australian mining industry. More importantly, with minor modifications, it could provide a useful framework for operational and safety and health professionals wishing to adopt a strategic approach to managing human reliability.

Factors in focus

Managing human reliability means considering and optimising the factors that shape human performance. Managing human reliability increases the likelihood of achieving desired performance outcomes and reduces the likelihood of worker error.

Usable procedures help to ensure that the entire workforce operates from the same information. Provision of clear, concise and accurate procedures can help prevent, control and mitigate unwanted outcomes.

Training and competence together, can reduce errors caused by lack of knowledge and teach people behaviours that will keep them safe. Training achieves and maintains levels of staff competency and improves their consistency.

Staffing and workload at appropriate levels is an important factor in maintaining a safe workplace. Appropriate staffing and workload management can improve effective decision-making and reduce the known contributory causes of safety incidents like fatigue and burnout. One way to effectively manage workload is to ensure appropriate staffing levels.

Organisational change refers to any changes to business processes, organisational structure, staffing levels or culture within a company. Managing change effectively is essential to avoid increasing the likelihood of human error occurring as a result of the change.

Safety-critical communication provides workers with the essential information to negotiate hazards in the workplace. Effective safety communication has specific content, which is delivered in a clear, reliable and timely way.

Designing for people involves designing work to meet the characteristics and needs of workers. During the design and redesign phases of all work, human physical and cognitive abilities and limitations, should be considered. Thoughtful design can reduce human error and improve safety performance.

Fitness for work relates to the capacity of workers to do their role safely and productively. Fitness for work covers individual factors such as fatigue, medical fitness, mental health and wellbeing, and alcohol and other drug use.

Health and safety culture is a reflection of the organisation’s commitment and prioritisation of health and safety. A positive safety culture reflects in the safety management systems and the values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies and behaviours of the people working there.

Maintenance, inspection, and testing includes preventative work to maintain plant in sound operating condition, and reactive work for repair of plant that has broken down or failed. Testing and inspection are an important part of maintenance. It is essential that factors that increase the likelihood of error during maintenance are considered to design, manage and improve safe maintenance, inspection and testing activities.

To access the wide range of resources on human and organisational factors, visit the Department’s HOF hub.