Safety and human resources go hand in hand. Just ask any HR professional how much of their time is preoccupied with safety-related issues and they’ll almost certainly answer, “A lot more than you think.” And while many companies have dedicated safety professionals—or even entire EHS departments—that doesn’t mean that HR specialists should stop thinking or caring about safety.  

After all, many HR challenges are fueled by the same issues that cause safety-related incidents: human factors. That’s because human factors like rushing, fatigue and distraction are fundamentally people issues. And people issues are HR’s territory. Understanding this overlap between safety and HR can go a long way towards addressing their common challenges. 

Human factors are the foundation for all sorts of problems 

If you take a look at any given safety incident, you’re likely to find a human factor involved. A human factor may be the sole cause of an incident—for example, some people can be so fatigued that they trip over their own feet—or it may be one contributing cause among many. Other times a human factor may exacerbate the downside of an incident, such as a forklift striking a pedestrian and having even worse outcomes because the driver was speeding. 

Any way you look at it, human factors are likely to be involved in safety issues. And the same can be said in the realm of HR. Problems like interpersonal conflict, lack of engagement and employees not following procedures often stem from frustration, complacency and ambiguity, all of which are human factors.  

Human factors don’t respect departmental boundaries, either. If someone is fatigued, they may cause a conflict with a co-worker or they may cause an injury to themselves or others. Human resources and safety may track those two events differently, but the root cause is the same. Fortunately, the solution for both EHS and HR is the same too—human factors management. 

Human factors management drives culture for both HR and safety 

Safety and human resources can both credibly claim to “own” the issue of culture. The EHS department has the power to build (or let atrophy) an organization’s safety culture, and safety folks also set an organization’s safety climate. Meanwhile, HR has their eye on monitoring (and positively influencing) how workers think, feel and act in regard to their employer. 

Many of the attitudes that are used to measure culture, from engagement levels to feelings of psychological safety, are influenced by human factors. It’s not a coincidence that organizations with low employee engagement also tend to have a lackluster approach to managing human factors. 

Human factors management is a concrete means with which both EHS and HR departments can positively influence culture. It also helps organizational leaders establish a common language and a broad understanding of no-blame accountability, and it can drive long-term upticks in job satisfaction, trust and safety outcomes. Those are results that will make both safety and human resources people happy. 

Human factors can make work harder—and managing them can make it easier 

When human factors contribute to safety incidents, the immediate effects are felt by the safety department, but the repercussions can also cause all sorts of challenges for the HR department down the road. An injury can lead to increased employee turnover, workers’ comp issues and lost productivity. It can also cause higher rates of employee churn in the long term, as workers seek to leave an employer that they may begin to view as becoming too dangerous to work for.  

These problems can then contribute to additional safety concerns. As experienced employees depart and are replaced with new workers, the risk of an incident goes way up, because new hires are much more likely get hurt than their more tenured counterparts. And if new workers are injured then the cycle begins again with the challenges related to workers’ comp, lost productivity and churn that can give human resources people such a headache. 

For many companies, developing the organizational capacity to manage human factors will reduce injuries and HR challenges at the same time. Fewer incidents lead to a stronger culture, less turnover and an easier time hiring, because a company’s safety reputation can make it a more attractive landing spot for potential employees, especially in a tight labor market.  

Collaboration between HR and safety professionals can make it a lot easier to convince senior leaders to implement a robust human factors management program. And because the benefits of managing human factors improve key metrics for both departments, there’s a strong incentive for everyone to do their part in sustaining the learning from human factors training. 

And when EHS and human resources folks effectively work together to reduce the impact of human factors? The company experiences fewer injuries and has a stronger culture. Employee turnover is down and worker productivity is up. And both departments see improvements in all sorts of other underlying metrics too, all as a result of a single human factors management initiative.