When looking to improve our Health and Safety outcomes, one of the most important areas to consider is our staff. The CEO, Board Members, paid staff, and volunteers are all intrinsic components to ensuring Health and Safety in the workplace.
Human Factors are those that essentially look at why people behave the way they do, and if we can understand that, we can make changes and put processes in place to make them safer.
Human Factors are broke down into three main groups:
Organisational Factors:
These are the characteristics that the organisation has that will influence staff behaviour, such as:
- Health and Safety Culture
- Commitment & Leadership
- Resources, Work Patterns
- Communication, Levels of Supervision
- Consultation and Training
Job Factors:
The parts of the specific job or task that will influence staff safety-related behaviour, such as:
- The task
- Workload
- Environment
- Displays and Controls
- Procedures
Individual Factors:
People will bring their own personal mix of knowledge, experience, attitudes, and personality. These will all influence their behaviour in significant and often complex ways. Some of these characteristics cannot be changed, but others can change or evolve. It is essential to recognise these characteristics, if they need to be changed, and how best to do that.
- Competence
- Skills
- Personality
- Attitude
- Risk Perception
These three groups of characteristics work together to influence staff member’s behaviour. Depending on how the factors interact at a particular time they affect how staff behave – safely or unsafely. Understanding these characteristics allows us to correct poor behaviour before it occurs by removing the causal factors. It will also help us anticipate and, therefore, reduce the likelihood of poor behaviour occurring in the first place which may be a health and safety concern or have an impact on how your policies are implemented.
Our People and Safety Team can offer advice for your organisation including your Health and Safety, Wellbeing, HR and Recruitment. We would be delighted to chat with you about your needs. Please get in touch with us at peopleservices@gcvs.org.uk to speak to a member of the team.
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