Construction has been significantly affected by COVID‐19 yet is critical to the post‐COVID economic recovery. Specifically, construction needs to be constantly aware of safety and risk balanced with timely project delivery. Guidance for COVID‐19 must therefore be implemented in a way that reflects working practice and pressures. There is, however, a potential knowledge gap regarding the practical feasibility and impact of applying COVID‐19 measures within construction, made more difficult by factors such as the temporary nature of projects and complex working arrangements. This article presents a commentary on safe construction during, and beyond, COVID‐19, covering the human factors challenges and practicalities of implementing COVID‐19 measures. We observe that while guidance is strong on risk management, understanding of how best to implement this guidance is not yet stable. Also, care must be taken that implementing guidance does not detract from general safety, which is also challenged by increased pressures on delivery arising from COVID‐19. There may, however, be opportunities for safer working practice arising from new awareness of health, hygiene, and safety risk. The role of safety leadership is overlooked in guidance yet is vital to ensure safe application of COVID‐19 working practices. The key message is that COVID‐19 needs to be integrated and promoted within a general risk management approach, in part because this takes account of differing priorities regarding safety risks, rather than overly focussing on COVID‐19, and also because the effectiveness of COVID‐19 mitigations can be amplified by integration with pre‐existing safety processes.
The paper examines how digital technology mediates the behaviour of consumers in three online systems that facilitate offline gift giving and sharing (Freecycle, Couchsurfing, and Landshare).Findings derived from a netnography and depth interviews reveal how technology is used to enact and influence the management of identity, partner selection, ritual normalisation, and negotiation of property rights. The findings have significant implications for the design and management of systems that encourage non-monetary forms of collaborative consumption.
22Minor safety incidents on the railways cause disruption, and may be indicators of more serious safety 23 risks. The following paper aimed to gain an understanding of the relationship between active and 24 latent factors, and particular causal paths for these types of incidents by using the Human Factors 25Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) to examine rail industry incident reports investigating such 26 events. 78 reports across 5 types of incident were reviewed by two authors and cross-referenced for 27 interrater reliability using the index of concordance. The results indicate that the reports were strongly 28 focused on active failures, particularly those associated with work-related distraction and 29 environmental factors. Few latent factors were presented in the reports. Different causal pathways 30 emerged for memory failures for events such a failure to call at stations, and attentional failures which 31 were more often associated with signals passed at danger. The study highlights a need for the rail 32 industry to look more closely at latent factors at the supervisory and organisational levels when 33 investigating minor safety of the line incidents. The results also strongly suggest the importance of a 34 new factor operational environment that captures unexpected and non-routine operating 35 conditions which have a risk of distracting the driver. Finally, the study is further demonstration of the 36 utility of HFACS to the rail industry, and of the usefulness of the index of concordance measure of 37 interrater reliability. 38
Nature is presented as a new paradigm for ergonomics. As a discipline concerned with well-being the importance of natural environments for wellness should be part of ergonomics knowledge and practise. This position is supported by providing a concise summary of the evidence of the value of the natural environment to well-being.Further, an emerging body of research has found relationships between well-being and a connection to nature, a concept that reveals the integrative character of human experience which can inform wider practice and epistemology in ergonomics.Practitioners are encouraged to bring nature into the workplace, so that ergonomics keeps pace with the move to nature-based solutions, but also as a necessity in the current ecological and social context. Keywords: Nature, health, well-being, ergonomics.Practitioner Summary: Nature-based solutions are coming to the fore to address societal challenges such as well-being. As ergonomics is concerned with well-being there is a need for a paradigm shift in the discipline. This position is supported by providing a concise summary of the evidence of the value of the natural environment to well-being.3
Technological and organisational advances have increased the potential for remote access and proactive monitoring of the infrastructure in various domains and sectorswater and sewage, oil and gas, and transport. Intelligent Infrastructure (II) is an architecture that potentially enables the generation of timely and relevant information about the state of any type of infrastructure asset, providing a basis for reliable decision making. This paper reports an exploratory study to understand the concepts and human factors associated with II in the railway, largely drawing from structured interviews with key industry decision makers and attachment to pilot projects. Outputs from the study include a data processing framework defining the key human factors at different levels of the data structure within a railway II system and a system level representation. The framework and other study findings will form a basis for human factors contributions to systems design elements such as information interfaces and role specifications. Practitioner summaryThe framework reported in this paper can become the basis for human factors guidance of engineers, developers and business analysts in developing appropriate levels of information display, automation and decision aid into rail II. Guidance will be aimed at the different functions and activities within multi-layered, multi-agent control.
Safety leadership is widely discussed, commonly relating to improving safety performance within an occupational environment. Whilst there is considerable research on the characteristics of positive and negative safety leadership behaviours, research to date does not evaluate these in the context of rail construction projects, with no specific consideration of the complex interfaces and challenges faced by temporary configurations of Client, Principal Contractor and Supply Chains within this sector.Twenty-one in-depth interviews were undertaken with representatives from Client, Principal Contractor and Supply Chain, to identify attitudes to safety leadership and consider how this may impact on safety performance. The level of understanding of safety leadership as a topic was evaluated against how well the study participants could explain the concept, and whether they could provide any examples of real world application. A total of 26 different examples of safety leadership interventions from the rail construction sector were identified from this study. These mostly aligned to nine good safety leadership areas identified within the literature, such as increasing visibility around safety, workforce involvement, providing recognition for good safety performance and ensuring effective communications. Half of the intervention examples provided were based around communications, in particular opportunities for leader engagement or the sharing of information. This study has identified that there are numerous safety leadership interventions being deployed within the rail construction sector, with the likely success of these leadership interventions being influenced by five themes; context, preparation, communication, leadership behaviour and style, and action.
Rail disruption management is central to operational continuity and customer satisfaction.Disruption is not a unitary phenomenon -it varies by time, cause, location and complexity of coordination. Effective, user-centred technology for rail disruption must reflect this variety. A repertory grid study was conducted to elicit disruption characteristics. Construct elicitation with a group of experts (n=7) captured 26 characteristics relevant to rail disruption. A larger group of operational staff (n=28) rated 10 types of rail incident against the 26 characteristics.The results revealed distinctions such as business impact and public perception, and the importance of management of the disruption over initial detection. There were clear differences between those events that stop the traffic, as opposed to those that only slow the traffic. The results also demonstrate the utility of repertory grid for capturing the characteristics of complex work domains. Practitioner SummaryThe aim of the paper is to understand how variety in rail disruption influences socio-technical design. It uses repertory grid to identify and prioritise 26 constructs, and group 10 disruption types, identifying critical factors such as whether an incident stops or merely slows the service, and business reputation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.