HUMAN FACTORS AUDIT:THE NEED FOR AUDITING HUMAN FACTORS

When we audit an entity, we perform an examination of it. Dictionaries typically emphasize official examinations of (financial) accounts, reflecting the accounting origin of the term. Accounting texts go further: for example, ‘‘testing and checking the records of an enterprise to be certain that ac- ceptable policies and practices have been consistently followed’’ (Carson and Carlson 1977, p. 2). In the human factors field, the term is broadened to include nonfinancial entities, but it remains faithful to the concepts of checking, acceptable policies / practices, and consistency.

Human factors audits can be applied, as can human factors itself, to both products and processes. Both applications have much in common, as any process can be considered as a product of a design procedure, but this chapter emphasizes process audits because product evaluation is covered in detail in Chapter 49. Product usability audits have their own history (e.g., Malde 1992), which is best accessed through the product design and evaluation literature (e.g., McClelland 1990).

A second point needs to be made about the scope of this chapter: the role of checklists. As will be seen, checklists have assumed importance as techniques for conducting human factors audits. They can also be used alone as evaluation devices, in applications as diverse as VDT workplaces (Cakir et al. 1980), and risk factor assessment (Keyserling et al. 1992). Hence, the structure and use of checklists will be covered in some detail independently of their use as an auditing technique.

THE NEED FOR AUDITING HUMAN FACTORS

Human factors or ergonomics programs have become a permanent feature of many companies, with typical examples shown in Alexander and Pulat (1985). Like any other function, human factors / ergonomics needs tools to measure its effectiveness. Earlier, when human factors operated through individual projects, evaluation could take place on a project-by-project basis. Thus, the interventions to improve apparel-sewing workplaces described by Drury and Wick (1984) could be evaluated to show changes in productivity and reductions in cumulative trauma disorder causal factors. Similarly, Hasslequist (1981) showed productivity, quality, safety, and job satisfaction following human factors interventions in a computer-component assembly line. In both cases, the objectives of the intervention were used to establish appropriate measures for the evaluation.

Ergonomics / human factors, however, is no longer confined to operating in a project mode. In- creasingly, the establishment of a permanent function within an industry has meant that ergonomics is more closely related to the strategic objectives of the company. As Drury et al. (1989) have observed, this development requires measurement methodologies that also operate at the strategic level. For example, as a human factors group becomes more involved in strategic decisions about identifying and choosing the projects it performs, evaluation of the individual projects is less re- vealing. All projects performed could have a positive impact, but the group could still have achieved more with a more astute choice of projects. It could conceivably have had a more beneficial impact on the company’s strategic objectives by stopping all projects for a period to concentrate on training the management, workforce, and engineering staff to make more use of ergonomics.

Such changes in the structure of the ergonomics / human factors profession indeed demand dif- ferent evaluation methodologies. A powerful network of individuals, for example, who can, and do, call for human factors input in a timely manner can help an enterprise more than a number of individually successful project outcomes. Audit programs are one of the ways in which such evalu- ations can be made, allowing a company to focus its human factors resources most effectively. They can also be used in a prospective, rather than retrospective, manner to help quantify the needs of the company for ergonomics / human factors. Finally, they can be used to determine which divisions, plants, departments, or even product lines are in most need of ergonomics input.