Focus of Human Performance is on individuals in the workplace becoming the best that they can be, maximising individual ability through their energy and passion, creating self-managing teams that actively practice interdependence, and instituting organizational behaviour and culture that maximises performance, enhances safety & reliability and is self-sustaining. Specific focus is placed on the following components of Human Performance:
- Fitness for Duty Fitness for duty is not merely whether you are healthy or not. The concept looks at whether the person feels capable of performing the work to the best of their ability and is not distracted by illness, stress, financial worries, marital and family disharmony etc.
- Organisational & Culture Development An analysis is conducted on organizational culture with focus placed more on observed behaviour, drawing inferences based on factual observations of team members of the potential impact of ‘the way we do things’ on organizational performance and safety:
- Professional Communication / Command & Control A highly significant percentage of costly, time consuming (and at times even fatal) errors occur in the workplace directly as a result of poor communication in the form of lack of context, misunderstanding, no idea of urgency & priority etc. In technical organizations where there are key safety and risk implications associated with poor communication, specific Command & Control communication has been developed, with focus on correct instruction, 3-way communication, use of phonetics etc.
- Team Development & Interdependence “Silo Management” is a concept heard very regularly when leaders complain about poor communication or lack of success. We talk about putting together teams when in reality we are often grouping independent individualists who may not have the team goal at heart and may be focused on ‘covering their backsides’. Our approach is to get team members to have real insight and understanding of themselves – strengths and defensive behaviours and to develop Interdependent behaviour.
- Shift Work Analysis
- Lifestyle Management. Do you know that as much as 20% of the population find it almost impossible to adjust to shiftwork; that owls (those preferring evening / night work) tend to do better than larks (those early risers) in adjusting to shift; that the Zombie Zone hours of 01h00 – 04h00 sees up to 800% increase in error; that certain sleep phases (especially Delta and REM sleep) are the most important for physiological and psychological recovery of the person; that proper sleeping, eating, social & psychological life management is essential if you want to manage shift AND enjoy quality of life and work/life balance.
- Optimal Shift Scheduling. The following issues need to be assessed when designing an optimal shift schedule:
- 8, 10 or 12 hour shifts
- Rotating
- Rotation Speed
- Clockwise or Counter-clockwise
- Day Off pattern
- Starting Time of Shifts
- Statutory Requirements (LRA; BCEA etc.)
- Shift Functioning – Working Individually, As a Group or in Team context
- Is Training built into the schedule?
- Incident & Fatality Investigation
- Root Cause Analysis: Making use of various root cause techniques and Error Type analysis to ascertain what fundamentally caused the incident and what factors contributed to this, with focus not on Fault Finding (unless of course when Rule Violation or Negligence is proven), but on future prevention.
- Barrier Analysis: If one wishes to really improve “defence-in-depth” in an organization, a barrier analysis is conducted where the 5 preventative barriers are investigated to see where the flaws are and to strengthen these.