Engaging Senior Management on Human Factors in Quality and Safety

Leading the way in Quality and Safety: A Holistic Approach to Engaging Senior Management on the Cost-Benefit of Human Factors

Last November, my article The cost-benefit of human factors was published in the Royal Aeronautical Society.

One of the biggest challenges for quality and safety departments can be to balance positive safety outcomes with the cost of achieving them. Treating the root cause of specific safety events or deviation from regulatory requirements may be obvious places to invest. However, there are often repetitive underlying conditions that should be mitigated but may not be considered a priority for spending safety budgets. It can be difficult to represent these less urgent safety considerations in monetary terms to senior managers, and therefore challenging to find the funding to prioritize or mitigate them. However, the financial cost of mitigating some of these underlying ‘human errors’ at later rather than earlier stages of a project or process can multiply quickly.

Ideally, we would expect senior managers to understand that failing to adequately consider the impact of human factors issues can impact on measurable costs. The most visible of these costs may include loss of human lives or injuries and financial damage. Less visible costs may include impaired human performance, reputational damage, and degraded organizational culture. It would be useful to consider measurable benefits alongside negative impacts. These might include absence of accidents/incidents, first-time quality, increased productivity, and an enhanced safety reporting culture. Less easily measured benefits might include improvement in human performance, enhanced reputation, and improved organizational culture or workforce engagement.

Through my career, I have already experienced and faced similar challenges and I have developed an holistic approach combining different concepts that could support enhancing the engagement of senior management.

You can read the full article with all the details here: