July 23rd, 2024 by Dakota Software Staff
Environment, Health, and Safety (EHS) leaders are under immense daily pressure to perform. An employee’s quality of life—and sometimes an employee’s life itself—depends on the efficacy of EHS programs. To prevent safety incidents, it may seem as if perfection is required, whether it be perfection in the hiring process, training, management, or on-the-job behaviors. But that mindset flies in the face of a simple, universal truth: nobody’s perfect.
The principles of Human and Organizational Performance (HOP) accept this truth and encourage leaders to shift their perspective on how their organizational health and safety programs should work. The benefits of the HOP approach are increasingly discussed among EHS leaders. See how this science-based framework can help you improve safety amid human unpredictability.
First of all, HOP is not an EHS or risk management system, standardized certification, or other process for which there is a step-by-step guide for implementation. It’s more like a philosophy rooted in social and behavioral science, a set of principles that can help guide our view of how an organization and the humans within it perform—and how these performance insights apply to safety.
While experts may define and describe them somewhat differently, there are five basic principles that make up HOP.
These principles may seem obvious at first glance. We all know that to err is … well, human. But when considered in the context of an EHS program, these principles may raise questions that can sharpen your insight and help you adjust your safety strategy. For example:
Do you actively encourage employees to report near misses (essentially, a mistake that thankfully didn’t result in an injury) without fear of blame or retaliation?
Do you encourage employees to discuss safety openly, with each other and with management, perhaps encouraging them to imagine how a mistake could be made and ways to prevent it?
Do you consider how other aspects of the organization (financial or production pressures, toxic communication, below-market wages) could create an environment likely to produce more mistakes?
Would your EHS systems and training allow for employees to “fail safely”? Or could a single error result in a very serious or even catastrophic event?
This is one of the key benefits of the HOP approach—a fresh perspective. But the value doesn’t stop there.
Adopting a HOP mindset can offer the following benefits to your EHS programs:
An enhanced safety culture. HOP principles that emphasize learning and responding to failure with communication, rather than blame, foster a culture of safety and continuous improvement.
Improvement on a systemic level. With the HOP understanding that behavior—including errors—depends on context, you can better identify and address issues at systemic and organizational levels, rather than taking the narrower view of emphasizing individual mistakes (which can lead to blame).
A resulting decrease in human error. While HOP stresses that you can’t totally eliminate error, you can reduce its likelihood and its consequences. The learning, communication, and 360-degree feedback that HOP promotes will encourage both employees and management to really think about the potential for error—and this extra vigilance can result in incident prevention.
As interest has grown in HOP among the EHS community in recent years, many have compared it with another popular school of thought in health and safety: behavior-based safety, or BBS. Some have even gone so far as to describe HOP as a more effective alternative to the “blame game” of BBS. However, this characterization is inaccurate, not to mention unnecessary.
To see why, first consider the table below that outlines some of the fundamental concepts and key benefits of each philosophy of safety:
Each method provides ways for EHS leaders to improve their programs—and when viewed in this context, you can see how a multifaceted approach can only provide more opportunity. For example, a systemic approach to root cause analysis, à la HOP, is vital for prevention of future incidents, but observing employee actions and providing feedback (a BBS approach) is also key to improving safety in the moment and gaining insights to improve training. And it is certainly possible to provide corrective feedback without resorting to blame—it’s all about how the communication happens.
So, HOP and BBS don’t necessarily compete or conflict with each other. Instead, view them as complementary strategies to help you build a safer workplace.
HOP is all about gaining a greater understanding of human error, identifying how and when it happens, and responding to it in a way that will help reduce the likelihood of its recurrence. Even when utilizing a formal BBS program, spotting and learning from errors at an enterprise level can be challenging. Software can help capture this valuable information and give EHS leaders the visibility they need to drive continuous improvement.
When properly tailored to the unique needs of an organization, EHS software can provide:
Data collection and reporting of safety incidents and near-misses that may be used to identify trends, while predictive analytics enhanced by AI can potentially foresee issues and guide decision-making.
Real-time safety monitoring and analysis via interactive dashboards and alerts. Dakota Scout’s data exploration tools, for instance, can help to identify subtle correlations that might go unnoticed with typical reporting tools. This type of “on the fly” analysis allows safety leaders to leverage their knowledge of processes and personnel to identify issues and address them proactively.
Communication and collaboration platforms that allow employees to share safety concerns and receive training updates to foster an environment of continuous learning and improvement.
HOP, like any other methodology, isn’t a panacea that will solve all safety issues. But it is another tool that EHS leaders can use to understand human error and apply those lessons to creating a safer organization. By bringing a HOP perspective to your current efforts and pairing these initiatives with software solutions built to optimize them, you can find another way to reduce the likelihood of mistakes—and the safety incidents that accompany them.
Visit our demo library to understand how Dakota’s EHS solutions can help your organization achieve its unique safety and compliance goals.
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