Controlling and Managing Human Errors in Workplace

Introduction

Human error is widely acknowledged as the major cause of quality, production, and safety risks in many industries. This course explains the underlying reasons why humans make mistakes and how you can prevent these mistakes. Although it is unlikely that human error will ever be completely prevented, there is growing recognition that many human performance problems stem from a failure within organizations to develop an effective policy for managing human reliability. Human errors begin during the design stage, extending beyond process and workplace design, into construction and continuing into the design of management systems for operations and maintenance. Such systems include management and training policies and procedural development and standard operating procedure development. This course will provide insights into current knowledge of human error and how it can be reduced. The course will provide hands-on experience of practical error reduction techniques, using real-life case studies. You will also gain an understanding of the underlying causes of human error and how to reduce its occurrence by changing the culture of the organization and changing the design of the processes. Workshops are used throughout the course to illustrate concepts and to demonstrate human error analysis applications.

Objectives

Upon completion of this course, you will be able to:

• Understand the evolution of human factors, their current scope, and how it may contribute to addressing future safety challenges
• Understand human error within the context of significant rail safety incident investigations.
• Incorporate practical proactive error management strategies
• Address human performance limitations that impact effective decision making and increase the probability of error occurrence
• Identify social and group influences that shape human performance
• Adopt a systematic human factors analysis method for incident investigations to better identify errors and error producing conditions
• Why human error is a factor in all accidents
• Why humans make mistakes and proven error prevention techniques
• How to analyze and identify human errors and the conditions and situations that  cause them
• How weak and deficient policies and procedures in areas of human resources, training, management, communication, and workplace design can lead to human errors
• How to improve and optimize procedures, workplace design, process design, and more to improve human performance

Training Methodology

This is an interactive course. There will be open question and answer sessions, regular group exercises and activities, videos, case studies, and presentations on best practices. Participants will have the opportunity to share with the facilitator and other participants what works well and not so well for them, as well as work on issues from their own organizations. The online course is conducted online using MS-Teams/ClickMeeting. 

Who Should Attend?

This training program is designed for those individuals seeking a comprehensive understanding of applied human factors in any workplace. Expected participants include:

• Operations and Engineering Senior Managers
• Team Leaders and Supervisors
• Human Resource Managers
• HSE and WHS Managers, Investigators, and Auditors
• Industry and WHS Regulators
• Quality, risk, compliance, and assurance managers

Course Outline

Introduction to Human Error

• Learning objectives and goals of human error prevention
• What is human error and human error analysis?

Understanding Human Error:

• Errors and their relationship to loss events
• Which is most important: Management system deficiencies or personal performance?
• Types of human error

Workshop: Classifying Human Errors

• Modeling human behavior (an example of a simple model that works is used throughout the course)
• Elements associated with understanding and issues in controlling human behavior and error

Workshop: Relating Human Error to Human Factor Influences

Common Human Error Prevention Techniques

• Information Presentation Rules (procedures, training, communication, signs, etc.)
• Process/Operation/Workplace Design Rules
• Other General Rules
• Exercises

Techniques for Predicting and Analyzing Human Error

• Checklist Analysis
  • For situational related errors
  • For management system related errors

Workplace walk-through analysis

• Guideword-based analysis (HAZOP, Job Hazard Analysis, etc.)
• Quantitative Human Reliability Analysis

Workshop: Deciding on Which Human Error Analysis Techniques to Use Workshop: Using Simple Technique for Predicting and Analyzing Human Errors

• Industry and Governmental Resources for Controlling Human Errors
• Related codes, standards, and regulations
• Industry guidelines