Page 17 - OHS, March 2020

HUMAN FACTORS
The Case for Managing Human Factors at Heights
Employers should follow safety regulations to protect their employees. But quite frankly, those measures do not cut it.
BY MATTHEW HALL
www.ohsonline.com
MARCH 2020 | Occupational Health & Safety 11
Employers are told that they need to follow certain safety regulations to keep people safe when they’re working at heights. But—to be blunt—those measures aren’t enough. Every
day, human factors like fatigue, complacency and the normalization of risk can lead to people falling from heights in the workplace, resulting in serious injury or death. If an organization doesn’t have a practical plan to deal with those human factors then it’s not doing enough to protect employees working at heights.
Working at heights is the second-biggest cause of workplace deaths, second only to fatal motor crashes. And contrary to popular belief, working at extreme heights is not the only deadly part of the equation. One-quarter of people who fell to their deaths did so from less than ten feet in the air. What makes work- ing at any elevation so dangerous is how unforgiving it can be. A single mistake might seem minor if you’re
working on the ground, but tripping over your own feet and losing your balance can result in a trip to the emergency room for people working at heights.
As dangerous as working at heights is for em- ployees who have to labor one or more stories up, it can be just as hazardous for people on the ground. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, a dropped-object injury occurs every ten minutes on average. Plus, even if no one is struck by falling objects, retrieving tools that have fallen can lead to frustrating production delays.
Workers continue to die from lower-level falls at unprecedented rates, despite a plethora of equipment designed to keep people safe. The challenge isn’t a lack of safety equipment. Instead, the problem emerges when an unforgiving work environment combines with human error, and the risk of working at heights is normalized. When that happens, the probability of falls goes way, way up.
Human Factors at Heights
Human factors may be the most perennially misun- derstood concept in safety. However, the basic con- tours of the topic are quite straightforward: the physi- cal and mental state of a person can affect how safely they do their jobs. This is why workers who are tired, for example, are more likely to be injured, whereas workers who are completely focused on the task at hand are less likely to get hurt.
Because working at heights means that employ- ees are literally teetering on the brink for much of their day, and their margin for error is so thin, even a slight increase in the likelihood of making a mistake as a result of human factors could dramatically alter the prospect of a fall. For people working at heights, the ability to contend with fatigue, distraction and other human factors is very often the difference between needing to rely on a fall arrest harness or not—that is, if they remembered to wear a fall har- ness in the first place.
One only needs to take a glance at the statistics to see just how deadly human factors can be for people working at elevation. In particular, compla- cency and the desensitization of risk can dramati- cally skew workers’ perceptions of how dangerous it can be to labor at heights.
Notably, the most common height to fall from is between six and 10 feet, and four out of every 10 fall- related deaths happen from 15 feet or less. These are
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