FACTS
- Human factors like rushing, frustration, fatigue and complacency can increase the risk of making a mistake, clouding a decision, or causing an injury. But not everyone recognizes the scale of these problems, nor do they realize they can be managed with personal safety skills.
- Studies indicate and common sense suggests new workers with less than six months’ experience on the job are more likely to be involved in an accident than experienced workers.
- The primary causes of new workers getting injured are: 1) the absence of established safe job procedures, 2) inadequate appreciation of the dangers involved, and 3) lack of proper training.
- Training plays a vital part in the risk exposure and risk avoidance equation. Inexperienced, inadequately trained workers are more likely to place themselves in greater risk inadvertently because they do not know better. The inexperienced worker has no basis for judging the risk associated with a particular behavior other than the training. An inexperienced worker may determine the risk to be higher than an experienced co-worker. The inexperienced worker is less likely to be complacent, take chances, or deviate from the training.
- Injuries, big or small, are difficult to prevent with compliance alone as they are largely the result of worker actions—usually fuelled by complacency and other human factors like rushing, frustration, and fatigue—that lead to inattention and unintentional errors.
STATS
- More than 69% of workers feel fatigued at work
- According to a 2018 survey report by the National Safety Council (NSC), two-thirds of the US labor force experiences workplace fatigue. This means that almost 107 million out of the 160 million US workers are affected by occupational fatigue.
- According to numerous studies, being awake for long periods of time is akin to being inebriated. A loss of two hours of sleep is similar to having 3 beers, while a loss of 4 hours is equivalent to having a six pack in the amount of impairment.
- In the US, the legal alcohol limit for driving varies from state to state. But, the standard is .008 for residential drivers and .004 for commercial drivers. This means that fatigued people who are driving home from work or as part of their work are putting themselves and the people around them at severe risk.
- According to Wrike’s United States stress statistics from 2019, only 6% of workers don’t report feeling stressed at work. Around 23% of them described their stress levels as high, while 6% said their levels of stress were unreasonably high. This statistic indicates that working in a stressful working environment is the rule, not the exception.
- 35% of respondents said their main source of stress at work was their boss.