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Human and organisational factors refer to the individual characteristics and attributes of an organisation that influence behaviour at work along with health and safety. These factors are important to consider to ensure the protection of employees and help prevent accidents or incidents. 

We started to look at human and organisational factors in around 2018/19, to consider how industries such as aviation and petrochemicals did things differently. Those industries are probably 20 years ahead of where the construction and infrastructure industries are in terms of their understanding. They look at how the human fits into the system, and how to build the system around the human instead of buying a bit of kit and then expecting the human to work out how to do the job.

We've been on this project for five years now and that has got us to the starting line. We're now starting to deliver projects, but it's going to be another ten years before this becomes business as usual. We’re analysing the planning phase, which then links into our risk management systems, our bowtie risk analysis, which sets out all the control measures from procurement, design, management, supervision – all the way to the operatives.

We're looking at how we design tasks and processes. We used to write long documents that nobody ever read. These documents were only ever useful when things went wrong. We had a packet of data that we could give to the SHE and say, look, we wrote it all down. So, it was that person’s fault. But if you think of it from a human factor’s perspective, if you write a work instruction with clarity and concision, people can understand what you want them to do.

So, you must shift away from writing the system for conformance (be that in terms of legislation or ISO standards) to performance, so the individuals doing the task can read it, understand it and work to it. People then feel empowered to speak up if the process isn't right. We want to know when our operatives have a shortcut to our process, because if they've got a shortcut, we've got a hole in our system. Whatever they're doing is uncontrolled in terms of getting to the end outcome.

Culture starts at the top.
When you look at the psychological side of how and why people do what they do, you can start to see behavioural patterns. Leadership teams generally have the belief that everything's going quite well, although that is usually because managers and supervisors don't want bad news travelling up the chain in case it reflects badly on them. So, it's the unknowns that come to get you.

If you have a good culture that starts from the top, you can figure out quickly what is not right. One of the things that we've coached our leadership team to do is to ask people, ‘As a leader, how can I make your life better? How can I make going to work easier for you?’ They might not be able to deliver on everything straightaway, but at least they're then aware of it and it can go into the continual learning cycle. It might just be those little nuggets of information that ultimately saves somebody's life.

We're also looking at prevention rather than cure. So, we’re looking for the causes of stress, and the causes of ill health. Historically, we tend to look at managing the outcome as opposed to managing the cause. If we're loading a wheelbarrow 60 times a day and we're lifting it onto the back of a truck, it's no wonder we're getting musculoskeletal issues. So, you need to look at the planning side of things. How do we get that dirt from the ground onto the back of the lorry without a person lifting it? Within industry, the health piece has generally been kicked into the long grass because it's not an immediate consequence. It's a build-up of repetition, and exposure over the years, that leads to somebody having a bad back – or to having a mental breakdown. It's everything that builds up over time. So, we’re looking at how we can control and thereby reduce the amount of stress that the occupation puts on the individual.

Everything is intrinsically linked. The way that you've set up your safety management system affects the way that you run your behavioural safety programmes, which affects the way that your culture is shaped and formed. It's no good telling people to behave in a particular way if the system doesn't enable that to happen.

We've done a lot of work around standardisation and aligning documents within our system, and we've split out the ownership of those control measures. Historically we focused all our safety systems on the operative. But the operative doesn't have a choice over what vehicle they are given, what time of day they go to work, or whether they get an insulated shovel or not. That's all dealt with by the manager.

So, there is no point telling people, make sure you have the correct plan, make sure you are trained and competent. That should be on the person who's putting them to work, in the safety of the office without the pressure of a dynamic environment, or time or financial pressures. That means, when the guys go out to site, they've got less things to think about, because it's already been done and if they have a more efficient way of doing something, that can be done safely – that’s what we want to be doing.

Safety management systems can improve company performance.
If you know your risks, have reliable control measures, are collecting usable metrics and really understand how well your system is performing; you can then tie all that into the way that you communicate to key stakeholders and your management system will allow you to genuinely know and forecast outcomes. That means you can programme better, and price work better, because you know how much it is going to cost, the timeframe it will be done in, and the likely consequence or outcome.

You can then make the money that you forecast to make, and give your clients the quality you have said you are going to give them. You are going to have fewer errors. Fewer mistakes will be made by individuals, which means less chance of something going wrong, which means better staff retention. It means that, overall, the company will perform to expected standards.

We talk about silos a lot in industry. Human factors are about knocking them down. It is about understanding how the whole machine works. Ultimately, if we are all successful, we all achieve. There will always be trade-offs between different priorities, but it is about getting the best for them all instead of focusing on one to the detriment of another. If we can get to that balance point, and stop the unknowns coming together, it means we’ll have better continuous performance.