Abstract
Significant advances have been made in the field of human and organisational factors (HOF) integration in industrial groups these last decades. Nowadays, HOF are generally quite structured in companies, in the form of a coalition between a few key departments and their allies. Nevertheless, various features limit their scope, notably in their impact on the organisation. First, we must acknowledge that the ‘o’ in Human and organisational Factors is a small ‘o’. What lies behind this statement is that the human factors approach dominates, and the purely organisational approach is given far less attention. Then the various approaches usually remain limited to safety issues. HOF issues are rarely considered in strategic trade-offs, or in restructuring or management discussions. Finally, since the success of HOF implementation is mostly built on the political will and relationships of a few key individuals with top managers, they usually do not persist when these people leave. Beyond these observations, this chapter, based on a solid experience of HOF approaches that have been implemented since the 2000s in different industrial sectors, explores the underlying reasons for these limitations and proposes some ways forward for a better integration and sustainability of HOF in high-risk companies.
Highlights
Human and Organisational Factors with a Small “O” (HoF)Many high-risk companies often present the incorporation of human and organisational factors (HOF) as the last step in their safety strategy, after having first taken essentially technical procedural measures.There is no doubt that this approach has allowed progress to be made in the dissemination of the major concepts illustrating the human contribution to safety
Many companies are considering the importance of managed safety as a complement to rule-based safety and this tends to be reflected in their structuring of human and organisational factors
We propose to examine this hypothesis in more depth, based on experience of HOF approaches implemented since the 2000s in high-risk companies
Summary
Many high-risk companies often present the incorporation of human and organisational factors (HOF) as the last step in their safety strategy, after having first taken essentially technical procedural measures. There is a growing acceptance of the difference between work as done
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