Systems Safety: The Critical Role of Human Factors and Ergonomics
Effective workplace safety relies on tailored solutions incorporating human factors and ergonomics to address industry-specific risks and cultivate a proactive safety culture.
- By Megan E. Gregory
- Jul 18, 2024
A door plug blew off Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 mid-flight in January 2024. Now the National Transportation Safety Board says it can happen again.
When it comes to safety in the workplace, there is no such thing as “one size fits all.” Every industry has unique risks and requires tailored solutions, rendering Human Factors and Ergonomics (HF/E) crucial. Among other goals, organizational leaders are charged with protecting their staff and customers - but do not always leverage the advantages of HF/E to ensure safety. A robust safety culture entails understanding risk factors and implementing preventative measures from a human factors perspective.
HF/E is an interdisciplinary field that studies how humans interact with the environment (including physical, cognitive, social and organizational aspects) to influence products, processes and systems. Improved safety, reliability, health, comfort and productivity are primary goals of HF/E. It looks at tasks across all industries from construction to data entry, what tools are used, how they should be handled, body postures while performing job tasks and other physical elements such as lighting, air quality and noise levels.
In addition, it also considers cognitive aspects such as mental workload, workload distribution and decision-making associated with the task. When it comes to ensuring safety and reliability within an organization, a robust safety culture is at the heart, one in which employees perceive that safety is a core value and feel that leadership regularly and continuously prioritizes safety above and beyond potentially competing goals such as productivity.
And the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has found a failing safety culture at Boeing, citing a disconnect between senior management and frontline employees. Their latest major incident comes on the heels of Boeing 737 MAX crashes in 2018 and 2019, reportedly due to poor design of the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), allegedly implemented as a cost savings measure to avoid required retraining of pilots.
However, lack of safety culture is not limited to the aviation industry. Dozens of health systems and hundreds of healthcare workers over the past decade have focused on safety and quality in the healthcare industry, finding that healthcare organizations commonly trade off between safety and clinical productivity (e.g., long work hours, high staff-to-patient ratios). While these factors can have positive benefits in that they increase access to care for patients, they can also result in medical error due to associated factors such as staff fatigue and workload.