SENIOR MANAGEMENT must understand how their employees learn in order to reduce the occurrence of human error in the workplace
SENIOR MANAGEMENT must understand how employees learn in order to reduce human error in the workplace.
Between 70 and 90 per cent of mistakes made at work are due to human error, according to a recent international study. As such, management needs to look at the way employees think and work, and how the systems they have in place for working can be better designed to suit their learning development.
Talsico International, a specialist learning and development consulting firm, has found that of 5,000 operators, a majority claimed they learnt their job through someone else.
“Whether we like it or not, that is actually how people are going to learn, so we have to build upon that rather than throw new technology or some great trainer at a group,” said Filomena Sousa, CEO of Talsico International.
“When we see a trend like this, with 87 per cent of people preferring to learn from each other, that’s our cue to research why they do it. What is it about the brain that makes them want to learn from each other?”
Sousa said that in order to reduce human error, effectively designed workplace systems needed to be put in place.
“We’ve had 100,000 years of evolution to teach us to work in an open environment with natural light. The way our senses have evolved means that they are not designed to work in an office environment with square walls and artificial lighting.
“So, there are some things about the workplace that can make us more error prone. We can’t do much to change our brains, but we can make changes to the workplace.”
Sousa regards placing errors into specific categories as the key to starting the error reduction process, as there are often a number of reasons behind people making mistakes. After identifying six types of error, such as learning gap errors, inconsistency errors and omission errors, finding the cause and remedy becomes easier.
Spending large amounts of money on training or electronic systems is a method of human error reduction that represents, Sousa stresses, a futile effort. Understanding how the brain’s workings can be accommodated is something all managers should consider.
“For example, we might decide we have an inconsistency error, where two people, given the same task, will make different quality decisions about it, or even where the same person could pass or fail the same task on different days,” she said.
“If we can understand what type of error we are dealing with, and understand some of the limitations of the brain, we can see how workplace systems might cause this type of error if they aren’t designed with a view to the way the brain works.”
