Safety related rule violations investigated experimentally

Abstract

Previous research in Human Factors has shown that improving safety in organizations requires the investigation of the interplay between organizational and person-related factors affecting rule violations. Two prestudies were conducted to test the validity of a newly designed experimental setting for investigating the influence of safety audits (organizational factors) on operators’ rule compliance behaviour in a simulated process control environment. The simulation environment simulates a production year of a waste water purification plant ( WaTrSim-Annual). The process requires the operator to decide in every simulated week (48 in total) whether to start-up the plant using the mandatory safe start-up procedure or to use an illegitimate start-up procedure, which leads to a higher individual income. Two notable observations were made. Astonishingly, in the first prestudy (N = 5), participants used the illegitimate start-up procedure i.e. 76% of all cases (27 of 36 possible violations), despite the fact there was a fine if participants’ violations were uncovered by the safety audit. To reduce the use of the illegitimate procedure, in the second prestudy (N=10), the training of the procedures was revised and the fine was raised. These modifications led to a less frequent use of the illegitimate procedure, but simultaneously led to more "soft violations" in terms of "fine-tuning" the mandatory procedure to scrape the safety limits. As a preliminary conclusion, the prevention of violations should include a just in time on the job training for refreshing the skills required to follow the rules.