Navigating Safety

The Impact of Human Factors on Organisational Well-being and Performance

Image: ESA Astronaut Alex Gerst’s Soyuz capsule

How does Human Factors interact with safety?

In an ideal world, humans are safely interacting with technology, hardware, equipment, and have good processes and procedures can minimise human error.

But anytime humans interact with each other or with 'technology', there is always room for error to occur, and where there is error, there is the risk of incidents and accidents occurring.

How do we know this?

The study of Human Factors has been around for decades, but came into prominence in the 1970s when a number of aviation accidents identified that the high death toll was caused by the ‘human factor’, and was not primarily a technical cause. Human Factors such as poor leadership, communication, lack of procedures, cultural issues, loss of situational awareness, poor user interfaces... were all causing or contributing to this high death toll.

Because of growing concern over this, an aviation industry conference was held at NASA in 1979 bringing together psychologists and airline pilots to identify and manage the human factors contributing to accidents.

This lead to the introduction of CRM ’Crew Resource Management’ training, aviation’s equivalent to Human Factors / Human Behaviour and Performance training.

How does Human Factors training help your organisation?

Awareness and knowledge of Human Factors allows you to identify where the potential for errors and mistakes can occur in your organisation. You learn models of Human Factors that enable you to spot where the risks lie and if you have the barriers in place to protect you. You gain an overview of your whole organisation and are able to classify Human Factors throughout, whether that's a personnel issue (from end users to managers and senior leaders), user interface issue, operational procedures and/or design issue.

Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS)

As it says in the title, this model is used to analyse and classify the human factors that are present throughout the entire organisation.

Image: HFACS, credit Skybrary

HFACS is most often used for accident analysis. It is a simple to use, popular method applied in multiple domains, with strong theoretical grounding. It was originally designed to provide the US military an analysis method of aviation accidents. With small modifications to the taxonomy, HFACS has been applied to air traffic control, maintenance, health-care practice, surgery operations, and to the rail domain.

HFACS uses the four system layers originally presented by Human Factors Expert, James Reason (organisational influences; unsafe supervision; precondition for unsafe acts; and unsafe acts) with an appropriate taxonomy for each of the layers.

When analysing accidents, HFACS allows for a comprehensive classification of both the latent failures and active errors involved.‌

Once data has been organised, statistical analyses can be conducted, so that the relationship between categories and hierarchical levels can be examined.

In this way, we can thoroughly identify all areas of an organisation and where the potential for risk, incidents and accidents may lie. This can be used in a predictive way and post-accident. NASA has their own NASA HFACS which they deploy every time an accident occurs.