The study of human and organizational performance (HOP), according to Susan Lee, process engineer with Marathon Petroleum, is more than a way of thinking: It’s an operational philosophy, not a program.
While acknowledging that error is inevitable, HOP also recognizes that organizational processes and systems influence employee decisions, choice and actions. Equally, while human error is an unfortunate likelihood, HOP focuses on learning from workers — rather than trying to fix them.
"You need to rely on the people who do the work to help you understand how to improve that work," Lee said. "When people realize that you are actually going to listen to them, you will be amazed at the amount of information you can learn."
Discussing HOP at the EHS Seminar and Industry Tradeshow held in Galveston, Texas, Lee noted that HOP "encourages the people doing the work to share their successes and failures and take part in improving the process to reduce the risk of an event."
This results in a marked improvement of "accountability, personal ownership and employee engagement," Lee said.
Citing author Todd Conklin’s 5 Principles of Human Performance, Lee said these principles "get incorporated into management systems and work processes, and into how we talk and how we behave — and particularly into how leaders behave. Walking the HOP journey is figuring out how you do work every day."
Improving organizational performance to impact safety
Susan Lee, process engineer with Marathon Petroleum
The first principle, Lee said, reiterates that even the best people make mistakes. "That’s just part of being human. We’re never going to fix that. But what we have to realize is that it is extraordinarily rare for someone to take action that intentionally causes an injury, a spill or a problem, whatever that might be. In almost every case, they were doing what made sense to them at the time. Our goal is to try to understand what they were thinking and why they made that decision."
The second principle asserts that blame fixes nothing and inhibits learning. "It’s natural to want to blame… but when we blame people, we are shutting down learning."
When workers make a mistake that they know will lead to discipline, that worker is often less likely to report what really happened to a supervisor, Lee said. And if that mistake isn’t possible to overlook, "you’re not going to get the straight story about what happened," Lee said, adding this subterfuge occurs more frequently on sites that apply "zero tolerance" policies.
"You have to understand context. If people think they’re going to lose their job, they’re not going to tell you what really happened," she said. "Let’s say, in a chemical plant, that an operator is supposed to witness a truck being loaded, but they walked away and the shut-off failed and it overloaded. Your initial reaction might be, ‘What were they thinking? They know they’re supposed to stand there — it’s in the procedure. They know they have to do that.’"
But suppose at that very moment, the operator had seen another operator collapse 20 yards away, and he ran over to attend to them, Lee explained.
"In the excitement of the moment, he forgot to turn it off," she said. "That’s why it’s real important to understand the context before you blame."
It follows that HOP’s third core principle states that context drives behavior. Principle number four points out that learning and improving is vital. "A complex system cannot be designed perfectly from the beginning," Lee said.
The final principle, "and probably the most important one," she said, addresses leaders’ response to events, whether those events are positive or negative.
"How we react matters," Lee said. "We want leaders who are focused on the learning aspect. And you don’t want solution steps to be overridden by managers. When we’re making changes, involve the people who are going to be doing the work."
