We’ve already seen that safety professionals believe human factors have a noticeable impact on hand safety. And there’s evidence to back them up.

One study looked at people showing up at an emergency department with a hand injury. It found that “the dominant hand was involved in 48 (50%) of the cases.” This means that the non-dominant hand was involved in the other half of the incidents. The study doesn’t specify the primary causes of the incidents, but the most logical suspect for non-dominant hand injuries is when the hand is left in the line of fire.

This is further supported by the National Safety Council’s Injury Facts, which says that the top two sources of injuries for fingers are machinery and hand tools. And the top two sources of injuries for the rest of the hand? You guessed it: machinery and hand tools.

These are tools and equipment that people tend to have control over. They are objects that people use frequently, day after day, week after week. Which makes them a breeding ground for complacency and distraction.

If you want to get serious about hand injuries, you need to get serious about human factors. In a previous excerpt from our new safety guide, Show of Hands: Insights and Strategies to Prevent Hand Injuries, we discussed how distraction and complacency can lead to line-of-fire injuries. Fatigue, forgetfulness and ambiguity can influence safety by causing employees to forgo PPE like hand protection. Rushing and overconfidence can result in workers placing their hands in pinch points. Let’s face it: human factors have a hand in a huge number of hand injuries.

The obvious solution has two components. The first is to conduct human factors training so frontline workers can recognize and respond to human factors in real time. That way, they can recognize when they’re more prone to distraction and will know what they can do about it. The end result? Better attention and safer hands.

Part of managing human factors is helping workers deal with specific physical and mental states, like when they become distracted or fatigued. But human factors management goes well beyond the individual level and includes recognizing how organizational systems and processes influence people’s actions.

This means that the second solution component is to embed human factors management principles into your safety management system. This will allow everyone in your organization—from safety to operations to senior leaders—to see workplace systems, processes and interventions through a human factors lens. It makes it easier to identify and correct otherwise hidden causes of incidents and allows you to sustain the momentum created by human factors training more capably. Incidentally, it also gives supervisors and safety folks a hand in supporting habit development—another key part of reducing hand injuries.

Protecting workers’ hands requires safety professionals to be ambidextrous. They need to manage compliance requirements with one hand while handling human factors with the other. They need to stay up to date with safety gloves while also influencing the safety climate, supporting better safety habits, and mentoring more supportive supervisors.

It’s a lot.

These might look like a series of disparate issues and interventions, but they’re all part of the same problem. Human factors are ever-present, turnover happens, and ongoing vigilance is required. One-and-done training and interventions simply won’t cut it. But human factors training, better habits, stronger supervisor skills and a focus on safety climate can help you maintain long-term success with less effort than you might think.

This blog post is an adapted excerpt from the safety guide Show of Hands: Insights and Strategies to Prevent Hand Injuries, which examines robust research and survey data on the most effective ways to reduce hand injuries. Read the guide today for more research, insights and essential hand safety pointers for your workplace.