Why is human factors important

Human Factors HFs refer to the interaction between humans and their environment when completing a task. Factors can relate to the individual, the organisation, the task and the environment. Essentially, it involves the person, what they are being asked to do and where they are working. These factors can influence behaviour in the work place, which can in turn affect health and safety.

HFs involves understanding the strengths and limitations of humans, and how these can introduce errors into occupational safety. HFs use a range of scientific methods taken from a wide range of disciplines e. Ergonomics are also often placed under the banner of HFs as it relates to the interaction between the human and the system that they work in and designing products, processes and systems that optimise human performance. This generic statistic is repeated across safety critical industries including aviation, healthcare, nuclear power and the oil and gas industry See Safety at the Sharp End.

Investigations into major accidents identify human factors as root causes. For example, in the oil and gas industry this includes but is not limited to: Piper Alpha, Deepwater Horizon, Montara, Bardolino, and Petrobras P as well as small scale incidents and personal injuries see Roberts et al.

Consequently, understanding human factors is vital for safe and effective performance. Human factors originated during WWII as a method for keeping pilots alive by looking at the factors that made pilots successful Wickens et al.

Attention was focused on pilot performance, human limitations, and aircraft design — a combination that could determine the success or failure of a mission. A century on HFs are recognised across safety critical industries as vital for trapping and reducing errors, incidents and accidents.

This includes healthcare referred to as patient safety , maritime, military, nuclear power, mining, rail, and more recently oil and gas. Work 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.

People factors low skill and competence levels tired staff bored or disheartened staff individual medical problems.

Organisation 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. Like this: Like Loading Search for Recent posts Nimrod XV 15 years on Should you focus on behaviours? Follow me on Twitter My Tweets. Follow Blog via Email Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

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These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. I Accept Show Purposes. Table of Contents View All. Table of Contents. What Is Human Factors Psychology? Work Environment. Why Study This Field? Important Topics. What Is Clinical Psychology? Major Branches of Psychology.

Was this page helpful? Thanks for your feedback! Sign Up. What are your concerns? Verywell Mind uses only high-quality sources, including peer-reviewed studies, to support the facts within our articles. Only when you are able to chart the negative effects to your business resulting from a lack of consideration for human factors, can you understand their true importance.

Referring back to emotional intelligence here for a moment, if the approach to leveraging human factors for business growth or development are from a bottom-line perspective, you run into the same issue as every business that only uses numbers and statistics to determine such outcomes. Human factors are complex and complicated, impacted by non-technical things like culture, behaviours and personalities, all things that are lost when reduced to mere numbers.

For instance, any system that reduces data handling steps will reduce the chance of human error in critical operations such as accounting, finance or payroll. Any employees using such a system would have the peace of mind of reduced errors, and would therefore be productive in more ways than one: working faster because of the optimal system and working faster because of the optimal human factor reduced stress of mistakes.

Human Factor study has been a topic of investigation in various worldwide industries for quite some time, yet even now merits careful examination before implementation. There are immense benefits to getting it right, so long as you tackle it appropriately and with the right objectives. A career change in the current market is inevitable with everyone seeking out better-suited positions or salaries. Although there is typically more movement in the.

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