Getting the workload balance just right

Our desk top review looks at your safety management system and associated documents, identifying all assigned tasks for each role or activity. We usually consider normal, degraded and emergency situations, along with routine and non-routine maintenance tasks. The exercise provides a baseline of activities as planned by an organisation. We can meet and discuss the mapping work with your team, checking that we’ve interpreted your documents as intended. To make sure we catch activities that are not recorded, we observe and interview target employees, such as a ship’s crew, office staff, signallers or rig workers. 

 You gain a clear, detailed and comprehensive understanding of the activities being completed in the setting. For a manning efficiency analysis, this work helps us assess the impact of any changes to personnel or responsibilities. 

When you know what your personnel need to do and by when, you’re best placed to assess current workloads and make changes. For each staff member, we can determine: 

• the hours worked and logged
• the workload experienced for completing time-intensive and critical activities
• how different levels of workload are viewed and experienced.

We collect different types of workload data to best meet each client’s requirements. Examples include:

• workload data collection, based on time occupancy
• post-observation interviews, probing activity and workload 
• on-task, self-assessment workload data collection (such as NASA-TLX). 

Alongside activity mapping, we’ll help you understand the likelihood of human errors across the safety critical activities we’ve identified. You have two assessment options:

• qualitative – identifying potential human failures with the aim of optimising the factors that enhance human performance
• quantitative – as above, plus estimating the likelihood of such failures occurring. 

Whichever assessment is best for you, we’ll consider the main hazards and risks with each activity. And we’ll identify activities where manning may change, specifically where people and hazards come together and could be a major source of risk if there’s human error. For the latter, this comprehensive assessment: 

• considers maintenance and response to upsets and emergencies, as well as normal operations 
• identifies potential human failures in these key steps by considering how activities could be performed incorrectly 
• identifies performance influencing factors that make these failures more likely, such as time pressure, fatigue or the quality of procedures
• manages failures using the hierarchy of control – for example, considering changes to responsibilities, eliminating the hazard or optimising performance influencing factors
• manages error recovery, ensuring the error can be identified (either by the person who made the error or someone else) and recovered from.

We’ll highlight where you can make efficiency improvements and adjust manning levels. We do this by determining a workload level and efficiency indicator for each current function. We then look at the flexibility of tasks performed across fixed and non-fixed roles in relation to the mapped activities.  

Specifically, we’ll work through potential scenarios for your organisation, reallocating activities and responsibilities based on known constraints (such as regulations or certification requirements). In this way, you’ll know the effect of scenarios on a workload and the risk of human error, and see where efficiencies can be made safely.