Sociotechnical approaches to workplace safety: Research needs and opportunities.

The sociotechnical systems perspective offers intriguing and potentially valuable insights into problems associated with workplace safety. While formal sociotechnical systems thinking originated in the 1950s, its application to the analysis and design of sustainable, safe working environments has not been fully developed. To that end, a Hopkinton Conference was organised to review and summarise the state of knowledge in the area and to identify research priorities. A group of 26 international experts produced collaborative articles for this special issue of Ergonomics, and each focused on examining a key conceptual, methodological and/or theoretical issue associated with sociotechnical systems and safety. In this concluding paper, we describe the major conference themes and recommendations. These are organised into six topic areas: (1) Concepts, definitions and frameworks, (2) defining research methodologies, (3) modelling and simulation, (4) communications and decision-making, (5) sociotechnical attributes of safe and unsafe systems and (6) potential future research directions for sociotechnical systems research. PRACTITIONER SUMMARY: Sociotechnical complexity, a characteristic of many contemporary work environments, presents potential safety risks that traditional approaches to workplace safety may not adequately address. In this paper, we summarise the investigations of a group of international researchers into questions associated with the application of sociotechnical systems thinking to improve worker safety.

Planning crowd events to achieve high participant satisfaction.

A case study investigation within a large UK university involving semi-structured stakeholder interviews, examined the organisation, coordination, and security within crowd events of various descriptions. Similarities in approaches and priorities emerged with crowd event organisation, primarily attention to safety requirements, in protecting crowd members, venue reputation, and legal obligations. Conversely, attention to and attitudes and beliefs surrounding user experience, crowd comfort and satisfaction, were often based on personal judgment, and appeared to be influenced by budget considerations. The findings suggest a lack of knowledge and usable evidence based guidance for planning crowd events in relation to important aspects affecting participant satisfaction.

A sociotechnical method for designing work systems.

The paper describes a new method for allocating work between and among humans and machines. The method consists of a series of stages, which cover how the overall work system should be organized and designed; how tasks within the work system should be allocated (human-human allocations); and how tasks involving the use of technology should be allocated (human-machine allocations). The method makes use of a series of decision criteria that allow end users to consider a range of factors relevant to function allocation, including aspects of job, organizational, and technological design. The method is described in detail using an example drawn from a workshop involving the redesign of a naval command and control (C2) subsystem. We also report preliminary details of the evaluation of the method, based on the views of participants at the workshop. A final section outlines the contribution of the work in terms of current theoretical developments within the domain of function allocation. The method has been applied to the domain of naval C2 systems; however, it is also designed for generic use within function allocation and sociotechnical work systems.