3.3 How Human Factors Influence Behaviour Positively or Negatively

A hindrance to achieving excellent health and safety standards is that they depend largely on ideal behaviour, and people do not behave ideally most of the time. How individual workers behave is therefore a critical issue for health and safety management.

Most workplaces are good at spotting and controlling obvious hazards. Yet assessing human factors should be a continuing effort involving every employee. Only by understanding human factors can an organisation find ways to reduce risk and prevent accidents before they happen.

A simple way to view human factors is to think of three aspects, and how each affects safety-related behaviour: the job, the individual and the organisation.

• Job factors relate to the design of the job and the nature of the task.
• Organisational factors arise from how the organisation is structured and managed. The systems, processes and practices in place influence behaviour and so affect health and safety.
• Individual factors relate to the person.

Organisational factors

People's behaviour at work is affected by the characteristics of the business they work for. A new starter quickly learns the ways of behaving that fellow workers and supervisors regard as normal. Workers and groups also react to the messages and cues they receive from managers and supervisors, though not always as intended. All of this reflects the culture of the organisation, so organisation-level influences must be considered when managing health and safety.

• Culture. Each organisation needs its own positive safety culture. It should promote involvement and commitment at all levels and make clear that deviation from safety standards is not acceptable. Culture sets the tone for behaviour: the priorities people see as important, how involved and attached they feel, and how far they can influence operations.
• Leadership. Leadership behaviour strongly affects job satisfaction, work motivation and performance. The style of management shapes how people work: which priorities seem important (speed, quality, safety), the type of controls used, how much individual responsibility is allowed, how people are motivated, and what support they receive through instruction and training.
• Resources. Management must make sure enough time and money are available for people to follow the rules and carry out tasks safely.
• Work patterns. Jobs are allocated and individuals perform their tasks within the organisation, so the organisation itself conditions the behaviour of individuals and groups.
• Communications. Communication is essential in many safety-critical activities, such as lifting operations, emergency response and confined space entry, and in coordinating different parties. Employees, contractors and visitors should all have access to the key information they need to deal safely with workplace hazards. This may include findings from risk assessments, site induction, evacuation drills, emergency instructions and safety warnings.
• Supervision levels. Key supervisory functions include planning and allocating work, making decisions, monitoring performance and compliance, providing leadership and building teamwork, and ensuring workforce involvement. The supervisor is the final link between planning a job and carrying it out, and can strongly and positively influence many local factors: compliance with procedures, training and competence, safety-critical communication, staffing and workload, shift work and fatigue, and organisational culture.
• Planning. Because accidents can have severe consequences, organisations should aim for high reliability in planning and decision making. Activities should be planned thoroughly, systematically and realistically, with controls such as training, PTW, contractor management, risk assessment, incident reporting and management review.
• Change management. Organisational changes, such as cutting staff, using contractors or outsourcing, combining departments or changing roles and responsibilities, are usually analysed and controlled less thoroughly than changes to plant or process. If poorly conceived or carried out they can harm safety, and even subtle changes can have large effects on how hazards are managed. Rapid or continuous change can also damage health, and badly managed change can increase stress in the workforce.
• Relationships at work. People need others to talk to and to share experience with, and working in complete isolation is not realistic. Preventing employees from interacting with colleagues leads to frustration and stress.

Summary notes for Element 3 · Cheat sheet · Glossary. A study aid, not published or endorsed by NEBOSH.