Human and organisational performance

In recent years, interest in Human and Organisational Performance (HOP) has increased with both client and member organisations adopting this as an approach to improving safety and operational outcomes. HOP is the most common name for several similar schools of thought that include ‘Safety Differently’; ‘Safety I Safety II’ and to a certain extent, ‘High Reliability Organisations’ and ‘Resilience Engineering’.

The historical view of safety has been that organisations considered their technologies, operational procedures, and safety management systems as being robust, reliable, and fit for purpose. Incidents and accidents only occurred when workers interacted with them and so drew the conclusion that the problem must lie with the worker. This approach gave rise to Human Factor (HF) Engineering (matching the worker with the technology) and Behaviour-based Safety (BBS) (fix the worker). HF and BBS played their role through the 1970s, 80s and 90s but once again, injury statistics started to plateau.

HOP was born out of the safety science community and took a fresh approach to how the worker is viewed. In essence, HOP is about learning and understanding how humans and organisations interact to accomplish work. HOP is a philosophy that allows organisations to build error-tolerant systems. HOP accepts that it is not realistic to expect perfection from workers or processes.