Back to Basics is a weekly feature that highlights important but possibly overlooked information that any EHS professional should know. This week, we examine Human and Organizational Performance.
As organizations strive to improve worker safety, some are taking a different approach that incorporates human factors engineering and organizational psychology. Called Human and Organizational Performance (HOP), the approach encourages businesses to look at workers and how they do their jobs in a different light.
What is HOP?
According to the National Safety Council (NSC), HOP “leads to better, more efficient, more resilient and safer workplaces where employees and leaders are both engaged and valued by each other and the organization.”
The HOP philosophy “recognizes error is part of the human condition and an organization’s processes and systems greatly influence employees’ decisions, choices, and actions, and consequently, their likelihood of successful work performance, i.e., work completed on schedule, within budget, safely and achieving desired quality.”
A group of 12 HOP experts have put together a website called HOP Hub that provides information and resources about HOP. One of the 12 is Andrea Baker, known as “the HOP Mentor,” who writes that “HOP (also called the ‘New View’ in some circles) is a global movement towards using the social sciences to better understand how to design resilient systems.”
Baker notes that HOP is not a program.
“The New View is a philosophy which, when adopted, creates a local culture change that leads to better system design,” she writes.
HOP provides more than just improved safety and health, the NSC writes. “Because HOP focuses on enhancing organizational processes and systems with an understanding that humans are fallible, organizations are better able to recognize, understand and address risk.”
Key principles of HOP
The NSC outlines six key principles for understanding and rolling out HOP:
- Everyone makes mistakes. All humans make mistakes, even the smartest and hardest working workers. HOP encourages that mistakes should not be treated as violations, which implies that the worker chose to make the mistake and must be punished.
- Workers are good at problem solving. The only way to get work completed successfully and meet organizational expectations is for workers to adapt to the work given to them every day.
- Context is what drives worker actions, behaviors, and decisions. Context in this case is defined by the NSC as organizational processes, expectations, values, incentives, goals, tools, resources, job-site conditions, training, mindset, and culture. In other words, it’s the totality of the work environment that employees experience as they work and that context drives their actions, behaviors, and decisions.
- Leadership response to failure is key. How your organization’s leadership responds to an incident influences if, how, and what events, near misses, and improvement ideas are shared with the organization in the future, the NSC notes. Handing out punishment will limit communications about the current event and will likely limit future communications and notifications about events and failures.
- Don’t play the blame game. Blame silences communications, cuts off access to information, limits learning, and stifles efforts at improvement. Leaders must resist holding someone accountable after an incident and focus on learning.
- Learning leads to improvement. Organizations can only improve after first learning after a safety incident. Action without learning can make things worse. Having a learning culture can ensure that learning opportunities are built into the organization’s work processes.
How to Get Started
Getting started with HOP is going to be different for every organization in terms of integrating HOP concepts, principles, and tools into the organization’s systems and operating rhythms.
One way to get started is by integrating HOP into your event reporting and response processes through the following steps, according to the NSC:
- Start looking at how an event happened instead of why it happened. Focusing on the why can quickly lead to blaming the person who made the mistake, but asking how can help identify weaknesses and opportunities in systems and the work environment.
- Train everyone who might receive reports about events, failures, or mistakes on the six HOP principles and coach them in proper response techniques and actions.
- The event response process should include time to learn about event before response actions are taken or conclusions are reached. Remove arbitrary deadlines and timetables for responding to an event.
- Eliminate processes that automatically require discipline for not following procedures. Take time to learn about an event before any decisions are made or actions are taken.
- Replace the punitive language used after an event with language more conducive to learning and improving. This includes replacing “investigation” with “event analysis” or “event learning,” replacing “witness” with “interviewee,” and replacing “evidence” with “facts, data, and information.”
Check out HOP Hub and the NSC for more information and resources on HOP.