2018 HPRCT Conference

Human performance holds great promise for improving safety and reducing SIFS (Serious Injuries & Fatalities).  In this session, we explore how easy it is for people to judge other people’s instinctive decisions, rather than exploring the context in which those decisions were made AND without using "the big stick approach".  Change how you view the world of behaviors, their contexts and how we interpret and learn from them.   
 
The purpose of analyzing the human behavioral component of any event is to understand why those involved did the things they did. Investigations attempt to understand the workplace conditions, worker attitudes, adequacy of staffing levels, and the effectiveness of leadership in order to explain what happened.  This presentation seeks to understand how worker’s decisions and the capacity of the organizational management system to influence of safe and at-risk behaviors make sense at the time, given the environment within which they were working.    
When we incorporate elements of Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) and Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) into the investigation it allows management to create an environment where workers can make good decisions by recognizing the role of the individual and human fallibility, identifying how organizational systems influence human behavior and embracing the role of the leader to manage organizational systems in order to positively influence human behavior.  Further, as worker behaviors are examined using the behavioral approach, the underlying & well-hidden management system at risk behaviors become apparent. When we reach these holistic conclusions, we can concentrate on improving the management system....instead of using the easy answer of the "big stick".  This blended approach allows us to become an advocate for the most precious resource we have – the worker.