Guest Contributor
Trending

How to Minimize Human Error: 3 Easy Steps

By | Lydia

No matter what you do, there will always be people in your company that make mistakes. Deadlines will be missed, software will be misused, and memory lapses will happen. We’re only human, after all.

Just because they’re inevitable doesn’t mean steps can’t be taken to minimize them and help keep your teams running smoothly. Below, we dive into some of the leading causes of human error and some of the most effective ways to reduce it.

Leading Causes of Human Error

Knowing what causes human error is crucial to reducing it. Though these causes vary among different industries and workplaces, there are two common causes that should be watched for.

Fatigue

Fatigue is one of the biggest causes of human error. A lack of sleep can lead to faster burnout, increased stress, reduced cognitive abilities, memory lapses, and hindered concentration.

This often has a ripple effect, where one person’s faltering means the rest of their team has to pick up the slack. This can lead to overwork and more fatigue across the rest of the team, which not only reduces productivity but also takes a toll on employee health.

Fatigue does not commonly occur in a vacuum. Oftentimes, it is emblematic of a larger issue with overwork, a lack of break time, or employees not using their paid time off effectively.

Stress

It’s no surprise that stress is one of the most common causes of human error. Stress leads to lessened focus, increased irritability, and various physical ailments that hinder someone’s ability to perform.

In a workplace, stress can have many causes. Poor communication with management or other employees can lead to a lack of support, which can cause stress, especially with difficult tasks that the employee may require assistance with.

Other than a lack of support, poor communication can cause overwork and many other human errors. Scheduling conflicts are a common example of this. When two schedules do not align, tasks may be missed, which must be made up later in a shorter time frame. This can lead to some tasks not having enough time to be completed before a deadline, causing stress as employees struggle to make up the difference.

Unsurprisingly, dealing with management can also be a cause of stress. Many employees dislike dealing with human resources, which can lead to tension within a company and increased stress among everyone involved. Notoriously common errors in human resources, like with payroll, can lead to stress among employees, causing human errors down the line.

Best Ways to Eliminate Human Error: 3 Techniques

Now that you understand two of the leading causes of human error, our focus can shift to human error prevention strategies such as bettering communication to changing the mindset around mistakes. Here are three ways to minimize human error.

1.   Better Communication

Poor communication can be one of the biggest causes of stress and overwork in a company, and a cause of human error in itself. Effective communication between employees and human resources is of utmost importance when reducing human error and bettering mental health.

This can be achieved in a few ways, beginning with reducing the ways in which your company communicates. Simplifying lines of communication helps focus communication through a few common channels, which is far easier to organize for everyone involved. Rather than keeping track of a dozen different programs, consider focusing on a few that are sufficient for your purposes.

As an employee, if you find yourself confused in a jumble of unnecessary ways of communication, consider bringing the issue up to your manager. Simplification helps everyone involved and can help reduce human error later.

Better communication also includes more openness between employees and managers. This can facilitate support to employees, which reduces stress and can mitigate human error.

2.   Automate and Employ Software

Human error often occurs for simple tasks, like data entry and payroll. Many tedious tasks of an office can be automated away with software, reducing work and allowing employees to focus on their most critical tasks. Human resources departments have some of the greatest opportunities to leverage software to reduce time-consuming tasks and mitigate human error, especially with conducting payroll and collecting feedback.

3.   Change the Approach

It may seem simple, but changing a company’s approach to mistakes can help lessen their impact when they inevitably happen and prevent them from happening in the future. Instead of treating mistakes as something to be hidden, treat them as an opportunity to learn.

If you make a mistake as an employee, it can be intimidating to report it to a manager for fear of punishment. To prevent this, it’s important to communicate with management before mistakes happen. This can lessen stress if mistakes ever do happen, as there is no longer anxiety at the outcome.

This facilitates trust between management and employees. By treating mistakes as a chance to learn, more errors can be avoided in the future as the root causes of the error can be dealt with more effectively.

How to Use the Swiss Cheese Model to Minimize Human Error

Another effective way of combating human error is to employ a prevention framework like the Swiss Cheese Model. This works by imagining risks (such as common human errors) as the holes in a piece of Swiss cheese. Each slice represents a line of defense to help prevent risk. Each hole in the cheese is a gap that allows the error condition to progress. When the holes align, a small issue can become a major problem.

This framework is designed to prevent those holes from lining up, chiefly by identifying them. If the small holes can be identified quickly, techniques like automation or support can be employed to fill the holes before they align. Common processing documents can also be used to prevent common mistakes by creating a universal method by which certain tasks are completed.

Human error might be inevitable, but it doesn’t have to be debilitating. By understanding what causes it, and preemptively employing certain techniques and frameworks, human errors can be substantially reduced, allowing your workplace to run smoothly.

http://

Please include attribution to Secureframe.com with this graphic.

<ahref=’https://secureframe.com/blog/human-error-prevention’>Human Error Prevention

 

Show More

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Back to top button