El Factor Humano, La fuente de Errores?. Human Factor, The source of the errors?.
- Alexander Álvarez García
- 14 oct 2017
- 3 Min. de lectura
I have a question that torture me, Am I crazy or are the other people crazy??.
Albert Einstein
Oh, my God. This topic is difficult to talk about because the answer is awkward most of the time is YES.
“Every head is a world”, this affirmation shows the cause of the meaning of the following paragraph:
“People bring to their job personal attitudes, skills, habits, personalities which can be strengths or weaknesses depending on the task demands. Individual characteristics influence behavior in complex and significant ways. Their effects on task performance may be negative and may not always mitigated by job design”. [1]
That explains that people are one of the principal causes of the accidents, and are those who receive their consequences. Every company, facility, an enterprise in the world grows with the synergy relations among the work’s actors. They are:
Which means, if these relations are bad, this might finish in tragedy. For example are Chernobyl, Bhopal, Tacoa, among others disasters. Strong relations are among these three linked parts and the principal causes of accidents around the world.
What is the best approach to solving this BIG problem?
Well, I have seen accidents in almost every facility I have worked in, even in administrative facilities, Why? Because people always have something in mind instead of been attentive in their jobs. Personal problems, economic problems, political situations, lack of common sense, violations of rules, among other items have reported in these situations.
We as a Health and Safety Professionals, own the responsibility of attack the system and bring solutions with economic, financial and technical feasibility.
I am talking about Human Factor in this post, and my focus is on that, then, what kind of human failures are there? In addition, what are the causes of accidents?
First, the principal causes of the accidents are:
JOB FACTORS
Illogical design of equipment and instruments
Constant disturbances and interruptions
Missing or unclear instructions
Poorly maintained equipment
High workload
Noisy and unpleasant working conditions
INDIVIDUAL FACTORS
Low skill and competence levels
Tired staff
Bored or disheartened staff
Individual medical problems
ORGANISATION AND MANAGEMENT FACTORS
Poor work planning, leading to high work pressure
Lack of safety systems and barriers
Inadequate responses to previous incidents
Management based on one – way communications
Deficient co – ordination and responsibilities
Poor management of health and safety
Poor health and safety culture
These items are interesting, the individual factors are related to the human factors, in fact, those are the causes of human failures inside the productive system, when you, as a hiring company, have untrained personnel, exhausted, sick, bored or disheartened, you will be staring at the perfect scenario of an accident. Also, if you have a poorly designed workstation and production planning, lack of safety systems, among others job and organization factors, you are beating too much.
Second, the human failures are:
Well Human Factor is the principal source of accidents, isn’t it? My opinion is NO. Is one of the principal causes, but the hiring company must do all the necessary to provide the best working environment possible, that one of the keys. However, if we attack the human factor, we must control one of the principal pieces of the game. Then, what can we do to solve this problem? One of the modern approaches is the Behavior Based Safety (BBS).
Many companies have spent a lot of time and effort improving safety,] usually by addressing hardware issues and installing safety management systems that include regular (e.g. monthly) line management safety audits. Over a number of years, these efforts tend to produce dramatic reductions in accident rates.
Often, however, a plateau of minor accidents remains that appears to be stubbornly resistant to all efforts to remove them. Although many of these are attributed to peoples' carelessness or poor safety attitudes, most of these are triggered by deeply ingrained unsafe behaviors. Behavioral Safety addresses these by making use of proven management techniques, which usually results in a positive step change in safety performance and safety attitudes.
With that in mind, a definition of BBS is Behavior-based safety is a broad term used to describe everything from basic employee behavior audits and feedback to a comprehensive safety management system designed to change a company’s safety culture.
The pillars of BBS are:
In others words, we are coming for the believes, the problems, and the situations that the worker has been living, then, we will try of shutting down, in order to change the collective thinking about the work and others factors. The principal goal is eliminated the Human Failures of the Productive System, if we achieve this, we will save money and lives.
A guide of how you can apply this technic is here.
Thanks for reading me.
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