3303 Human factors briefing note no. 21 – Supervision

Overview:

This document is freely available to all registered users of this site.

Supervisors have a vital role to play in maintaining the integrity of the barriers that have been put into place to manage process safety hazards, for ensuring the reliability of tasks, providing leadership, reinforcing standards and expectations for personnel behaviours and to counter deficiencies in management systems.

Why supervision?

Inadequate supervision has been a contributor to a number of accidents.

One of a series of 23 briefing notes, each briefing note includes:

• an introduction to each human factors topic;
• checklists of questions to gauge whether your company has a problem;
• guidance on what the company or management can do to address each HF issue;
• 'negative' and 'positive' case studies (illustrating both the consequences of an issue and potential solutions);
• suggested performance indicators (PIs) for the HSE 'key topics', and
• further reading lists.

The briefing notes will be of interest to anyone wanting to gain an overview of human factors or of particular human factors issues they are facing, and to managers who are looking to apply practical solutions to solve these issues.