Brian M Kleiner

• Virginia Tech

Since the early 1980s, human factors professionals have leveraged macroergonomic approaches to build and design complex systems. Macroergonomics is of increasing relevance and interest to modern human factors experts working to address societal and organizational problems. New questions within existing domains necessitate development of new macroer...

Introduction: Electronic health record (EHR) downtime is any period during which the EHR system is fully or partially unavailable. These periods are operationally disruptive and pose risks to patients. EHR downtime has not sufficiently been studied in the literature, and most hospitals are not adequately prepared. Objective: The objective of this s...

Newspapers, broadcast agencies, and social media outlets frequently feature stories about higher education administrators who are terminated, forced to resign, or otherwise removed from their posts. While the events are based in reality, many across the nation, especially the public, faculty and students, might develop a very negative view of what...

In the construction industry, recent literature has promoted a design for safety approach that discusses the benefits of considering safety from the very start of the project lifecycle. With this approach, non-construction personnel, such as owners and designers, need to work alongside constructors and subcontractors to consider safety during desig...

The construction industry is known as a male-dominated industry which is characterized by a " macho " culture. Site-based work is physically demanding and is associated with inherent risks. To mitigate these risks, occupational health and safety legislation is embedded within work practices to enable a safe and healthy working environment for worke...

Full report is available from AGC website at https://www.agc.org/sites/default/files/Files/Safety%20%26%20Health/AGC-VT%20Fatality%20Report%20%5BFinal%5D_0.pdf

Efforts have been taken for years to minimize the occupational safety and health (OSH) risk, but the injury records remain a constant reason for worldwide concerns. Many firms often implement technology as an administrative hierarchy of control (HOC). However, technologies may also actively influence safe practices at the managerial level for admin...

A recognition grows that the root causes of occupational safety and health (OSH) incidents can be traced back to problems inherent in industry-level construction systems. Despite calls for the engagement of owners/clients, designers, and all contributors to construction projects in the OSH effort, high levels of technological, organizational, and c...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to advance knowledge on the advantages of integrating safety earlier in the construction project lifecycle. Design/methodology/approach – A case study approach is used to collect data from construction sites in the USA, which performs poorly in construction safety and health, and Australia (AU), which perform...

Safety management in construction is an integral effort and its success requires inputs from all stakeholders across design and construction phases. Effective risk mitigation relies on the concordance of all stakeholders' risk perceptions. Many researchers have noticed the discordance of risk perceptions among critical stakeholders in safe construc...

The Prevention through Design (PtD) initiative identifies the design stage as an opportunity to “design out” hazards and risks. An early emphasis on safety enables the reduction of opportunities for error and misuse in healthcare technology, and the corresponding safety and well-being of patients and providers. A pre-condition for preventive design...

The construction industry experiences the greatest proportion of workplace electrical injuries globally. Much research effort has gone towards analyzing this phenomenon, yet a majority of which focused on isolated elements while ignored the work system. Modern work systems are complex, within which humans interact with technology, social structures...

Electrocution is one of the four leading causes of worker deaths in the construction sector and thus it is paramount to identify the electrocution mechanisms. This work interprets the mechanisms of an electrical accident as a chain of decision mistakes throughout the entire task process. The objective of this paper is to visualize the decision-maki...

Injury and accident statistics are widely used as ‘lagging’ indicators and descriptors of occupational health and safety (OHS) performance, despite questions about their reliability due to high levels of under-reporting. In addition, ‘lagging’ OHS indicators are ‘retrospective’ measures of things that have already happened and their validity as dir...

Risk perception is an antecedent to the conceptualisation of a risk control strategy. If project stakeholders do not perceive risks in a similar way, it is likely that they will have disagreement about how risks should be controlled and /or the adequacy of strategies developed to control these risks. If the disagreement is not understood and remain...

The construction industry has adopted control measures of electrical hazards for decades, however construction workers are still electrocuted in the workplace every year. This problem leads to a need for assessing the quality of control measures. The goal of this study is to assess the control measures of electrical hazards using a perspective of h...

This work uses a mixed methods research design to explore how social sustainability outcomes are impacted by early supplier integration and associated strategies for successfully implementing this integration. Much of the literature in the area focuses on environmental factors, while social sustainability factors such as worker and consumer safety...

Work health and safety (WHS) on construction sites can be influenced by decisions made upstream from the construction stage. The effectiveness of WHS risk management relies on decision makers’ ability to decide appropriate strategies to mitigate/control risks. However, it is unclear whether upstream decision makers share similar WHS risk perception...

This article reports on a study investigating the effect of procedural structure on work group interaction and performance. Twelve existing work groups representing six different organizations performed a process improvement exercise. Study results indicate that procedural structure increased equality of participation of work group members by reduc...

As evidenced by media headlines and scholarly discussions alike, the continuing interest in total quality management and reengineering prompts the question, “By which method should engineering management applications be guided?” That is, which method is most consistent with the theory base, principles, methods, and problems of engineering managemen...

Theoretical and practical approaches to safety based on sociotechnical systems principles place heavy emphasis on the intersections between social-organizational and technical-work process factors. Within this perspective, work system design emphasizes factors such as the joint optimization of social and technical processes, a focus on reliable hum...

Photographic Q-methodology was used to explore construction professionals’ mental models of occupational health and safety (OHS). Sixty Australian construction professionals participated in the research, including 15 architects, 15 engineers, 15 constructors and 15 OHS professionals. Participants were asked to sort photographs depicting different b...

Identifying and evaluating solutions for critical industry challenges is a major theme of construction engineering and management (CEM) research. Researchers and practitioners in the construction sector often seek to invent, test, implement, and disseminate practical interventions that improve safety, productivity, quality, and other project succes...

With the number of people with visual impairments (e.g., low vision and blind) continuing to increase, vision loss has become one of the most challenging disabilities. Today, haptic technology, using an alternative sense to vision, is deemed an important component for effectively accessing information systems. The most appropriately designed assist...

Despite strong advancements in construction safety performance over the past few decades, injuries still occur at an unacceptable rate. Researchers have shown that risk-taking behavior, originating mainly from inaccurate perception and unacceptable tolerance of safety risk, is a significant factor in a majority of construction injuries. Based on ps...

Hazard identification and communication are integral to most construction methods, and every construction safety management activity. Unfortunately, in practice, significant hazards are often not recognized and communicated leading to sub-optimal hazard awareness at the crew level. To bridge this gap in performance, we conducted a two-year intensiv...

The position of the constructor in communication networks, including those before the commencement of construction, is likely related to the quality of work health and safety (WHS) outcomes realized. In order to examine the extent of this relationship, 23 cases were drawn from 10 participating construction projects in Australia and New Zealand. Soc...

Electrocution is among the 'fatal four' in US construction according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Learning from failures is believed to be an effective path to success, with deaths being the most serious system failures. This paper examined the failures in electrical safety by analysing all electrical fatality investigation...

This research aims to analyse the within- and between-group similarity/difference in WHS risk perceptions of construction project participants. This study employs Q-methodology with an innovative photographic data collection method to explore construction project participants’ WHS risk perceptions. Specifically, a set of photos were selected to rep...

Social network analysis was used to model information exchange networks in construction case studies in the United States of America and Australia/New Zealand. For each case, the quality of work safety and health (WHS) risk control outcomes was measured. This measurement was based on an established “hierarchy of control” in which risk controls are...

Although the ratio of injuries and fatalities have decreased since 2009, their high rates still makes construction to be one of the top hazardous industries. OSHA and many companies that treat safety as their core value have stated repeatedly their strong desire for novel methods that speed up safety improvements. Improving the capability of hazard...

Most construction safety management processes rely on the hazard recognition capability of workers. Hazards that remain unidentified can potentially result in catastrophic injuries and illnesses. As such, thorough hazard recognition is fundamentally essential to protect the health and well-being of the construction workforce. Despite its importance...

Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) researchers have a long tradition of focusing on the individual or micro-level. However, HFE researchers have started expanding their focus to include organizational or macro-level factors. That said, a gap still exists of theories or models that explain the link between micro and macro variables. Identifying thes...

The Sociotechnical Systems (STS) approach has had an enormous influence on both research and practice within occupational safety and has been applied across a range of domains including construction, healthcare, transportation and manufacturing. This panel will discuss the outcomes from a Hopkinton Conference on STS and Safety held at the Liberty M...

The objective of this session is to display the range of contributions to human factors research and education by Professor Bentzi Karsh who passed away too early in August 2012. The session will consist of a series of presentations by colleagues and students of Professor Karsh to highlight his deep and broad contributions.

One of the most challenging aspects of safety for construction sites is ensuring that workers can predict, identify, and respond to potential hazardous conditions before they are exposed. From a scientific standpoint, we currently lack the knowledge of discovering the most efficient training styles for safety and also understanding why and how thes...

There is increasing recognition that many construction occupational health and safety (OSH) hazards arise as a result of activities in the planning and design stage. Improvement of construction OSH performance can be influenced by various stakeholder groups, not just the appointed construction contractor. It is important for stakeholder groups t...

In this study, we used qualitative data analysis to examine factors that are associated with shared understanding in the context of partially distributed conceptual design teams. The identified factors were then organized in an input-process-output model. The utility of the model as well as current and future works are discussed.

Nearly every safety management activity is designed around the fundamental and implicit assumption that the workforce is capable of identifying hazards before exposure. Unfortunately, research shows preliminary evidence that construction crews perform relatively poorly with respect to hazard recognition. This may be attributable, in part, to the di...

Background: Hospital acquired infections (HAIs) are a significant problem in healthcare systems around the world. In the United States, it is estimated that up to 1 in 20 hospitalized patients become infected with an HAI. HAIs increase morbidity and mortality, lead to drug-resistant infections, and increase the cost of healthcare. Objective/Purpose...

In this paper, we aim to identify different types of knowledge that needs to be conveyed during a conceptual design task. We hypothesize that different types of knowledge has different transferability in a partially distributed team setting, and thus influences team members' communication behaviors. The impacts due to different transferability of d...

Empirical comparisons of elicitation methods provide guidance to engineers for the selection of the best method for a given design goal. This work explores how alterations to the context (i.e, setting, prompts) of storytelling sessions impacted the types of user needs collected from 22 emergency room (ER) nurses. Six user need sets, comprised of 47...

Falls remain the leading cause of injuries and fatalities in the small residential roofing industry and analogous investigations are underrepresented in the literature. To address this issue, fall-protection training needs were explored through 29 semi-structured interviews among residential roofing subcontractors with respect to recommendations fo...

There is growing debate over the need for academic research to produce applied. For example, funding agencies, such as the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) are emphasizing direct relationships with industry, and the need to contain research methods that are targeted, useful, and mutually beneficial. Applied academic rese...

Data from the US Dept. of Labor indicate that workers in the US construction industry encounter the highest risk of electrical hazards. To establish a hierarchy of electrical hazards and controls, this paper aims to identify hazardous patterns for electrocution in the US construction industry through a quantitative approach. The identified patterns...

Safety climate survey instruments are a mechanism to measure safety attitudes and analyze differences between groups. In construction, the focus of most safety climate literature is on construction personnel. There is a growing body of literature however that discusses how personnel at points throughout the life of a project affect safety on constr...

This panel will be presented by the foremost authorities in the field of Macroergonomics as a tribute to the late Dr. Hal Hendrick. During the presentations and discussion, the panelists may choose to share their fond memories of Hal, while also focusing on the field of Macroergonomics, as Hal, the father of the discipline, would have wanted. Panel...

Previous research demonstrated that a haptic driver seat can effectively convey information to drivers, and suggests that it may be an ideal method for presenting haptic information because it maintains contact with the driver. The current study progresses this research by investigating whether a haptic seat can be used as the sole method for commu...

This paper is a case study of the key safety decision points in the construction of a large wastewater overflow tank. The key firms in the construction supply chain were identified, and key roles within these firms were conducted to find the key decision points in regards to safety on the project and the impacts of these decisions. The results reve...

Multiple types of users (i.e. patients and care providers) have experiences with the same technologies in health care environments and may have different processes for developing trust in those technologies. The objective of this study was to assess how patients and care providers make decisions about the trustworthiness of mutually used medical te...

Falls remain the leading cause of injuries and fatalities in residential construction. Because of job-specific work conditions and environmental constraints, the various construction trades (e.g., roofing, siding, or framing) employ different safety standards and fall-protection training practices. The purpose of this study, therefore, was to explo...

This panel will focus on addressing the current challenges of the construction industry within the context of Macroergonomics field research. Organizational, systemic and cultural strategies to overcome these challenges will be described. A brief introduction focusing on the unique characteristics of the construction industry and how they relate to...

a b s t r a c t Researchers across disciplines have developed measures of interpersonal trust, system trust, and trust in technology and sought to determine if measures of trust in technology should use the same trust factors as interpersonal trust measures. Studies have found evidence to support the notion that trust and distrust are considered op...

In the context of a capstone engineering design experience, American and French students collaborate on ergonomics and multidisciplinary design projects for industrial sponsors. Grown out of this U.S.-French relationship, a dual-degree graduate program was developed and was the first of its kind at Virginia Tech. Discussion focuses on the methods e...

Hendrick is attributed with the formalization of organizational design and management (ODAM) in ergonomics [Hendrick, H.W., Kleiner, B.M., 2001. Macroergonomics: An Introduction to Work System Design. Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Santa Monica, CA.]. Specifically, the method called "Macroergonomic Analysis of Structure" or MAS provides a fr...

Our goal was to briefly describe how macroergonomics was developed to fill a void in human factors and ergonomics. A study commissioned by the Human Factors Society in 1978 resulted in the formalization of a new subdiscipline of human factors, called organizational design and management, which eventually was coined macroergonomics. MethoD: Differen...

Rapid construction projects and processes will become increasingly important as customers demand better project management performance and globally, as countries plan for and respond to the aftermath of natural and/or unnatural disasters. For use in expedited projects (as well as traditional projects), a rapid universal safety and health system (RU...

Twenty-five years ago a group of ergonomics scientists predicied the future of the profession and the needed professional response to the anticipated conditions. One of the major conclusions was that organizational design and management factors would be increasingly important. Industry is one domain in which this need has materialized. This article...

In the U.S., a majority of construction companies are small enterprises with 5 or fewer employees [2] [3]. The objective of this study was to explore the needs of small construction companies and make safety training recommendations using Contextual Design (CD) methodology. Twelve participants from small construction companies were observed while t...

We examined the willingness and ability of general aviation pilots to execute steep approaches in low-visibility conditions into nontowered airports. Executing steep approaches in poor weather is required for a proposed Small Aircraft Transportation System (SATS) that consists of small aircraft flying direct routes to a network of regional airports...

The potential safety benefits afforded by emerging automotive crash avoidance systems may be enhanced by implementing a driver vehicle interface (DVI) that effectively communicates the direction of a potential crash threat in a timely, effective, and integrated manner. An in-traffic study by the authors provided evidence that drivers could spatiall...

In the event of a nuclear, biological, or chemical terrorist attack against civilians, both military and civilian emergency response teams must be able to respond and operate efficiently while wearing protective equipment. Chemical protective equipment protects the user by providing a barrier between the individual and hazardous environment. Unfort...

This study explored the potential for auditory and haptic spatial cuing approaches to alert drivers to the direction of a crash threat. For an automobile equipped with multiple crash avoidance systems, effective cuing of the crash threat direction may help the driver avoid the crash. Because the driver may not be looking in the direction of a visua...

Given the use of computers in the workplace and homes and the increase in the number of older adults in the next 20 years, the use of computers by older adults is a significant issue that should be addressed (Czaja, 1996). Due to the decline in cognitive skills as individuals age, deficits in working memory can place older adults at a disadvantage...

Rapid construction projects and processes will become increasingly important in the aftermath of natural and/or unnatural disasters. For use in expedited projects (as well as traditional projects), a Rapid Universal Safety and Health system (RUSH) was designed, developed and deployed. For its inaugural application, the RUSH was applied to a 106 hou...

We report on critical incidents in which pilot error occurred during field observations of landing approaches to a mid-sized, controlled airport. These occurrences included a case where a hand-off of air traffic control (ATC) from the airport approach to airport tower was delayed by the pilot, a case where the pilot requested an incorrect runway fo...

Benchmarking is a powerful management technique that can help improve an organization's environmental performance on a number of dimensions. Benchmarking is not a cookbook solution but a systematic process of searching for the organization that is the best at a given process (“best‐in‐class”) and continually adopting or adapting new processes to ac...

Manufacturing environments are characterized by underlying operational approaches and assumptions. One such assumption is that concurrent engineering (CE) is superior to traditional sequential processing. A laboratory experiment was conducted using 180 engineering and building construction students as subjects. The engineering methodology variable...

Attending to the larger system components such as organizational design and management is not novel for ergonomists. In Europe, there has been a strong tradition to investigate ergonomic problems within a holistic, systems context. "Macroergonomics" builds upon this tradition by providing specific methods and tools that yield large-scale results. I...

A laboratory experiment was performed to better understand the effects of visual conditions on pilot performance, workload, and situation awareness during a simulated approach to a regional airport for both VFR and IFR flights. Eight VFR-only pilots and eight IFR-rated pilots performed landing approaches during daytime, nighttime, favorable weather...

IntroductionHSI Competencies NeededAcademic EducationTextbooksHSI Training CoursesHSI CareersHSI Professional Personnel SupplySummary and Conclusions

Male landscaping mulch handlers were asked to use the Moldex N-100 filtering facepiece and provide feedback on factors associated with usability, comfort, and perceived value of the respirator. Recommendations for design changes to improve comfort and usability were solicited. Mean responses to questions employing a Likert-type scale indicated that...

Sleep deprivation, by impairing performance capacity, threatens health and safety across both civilian and military sectors. The Walter Reed Army Institute of Research (WRAIR) has developed a sleep management system (SMS) which provides a sociotechnical template for research in this area. A literature review was conducted to lay the groundwork for...

This research determined how team design and project management (planning and tracking) affected design performance and the personnel working on the design. A laboratory study was conducted to evaluate three factors: team design (individuals versus groups), project support (no project support versus manual project support versus automated), and the...

Philip Morris USA is constructing an automated storage and retrieval system adjacent to its Manufacturing Center located in Richmond, Virginia. This initiative will clear approximately 500,000 square feet on the Manufacturing Center campus that was previously allocated for direct materials storage. The focus of this project is to determine the most...

Traditional ergonomics has concentrated on improving such metrics as productivity, health, safety, and quality of work life. While such local improvements are important, increasingly, there is pressure upon ergonomists to achieve global improvement. This article reviews some of the basic concepts behind large-scale change and takes the position tha...

A controlled laboratory experiment was performed to test the effects of ergonomics training and the NIOSH lifting equation on the participatory redesign of a simulated manual material handling job. Before performing the job, 16 subjects were given ergonomics training and 16 were instructed on how to use the NIOSH lifting equation for manual lifting...

The MacroErgonomic Analysis and Design (MEAD) methodology can guide institutional data collection and analysis to determine the risks and causal factors leading to experiments that will help with new design and intervention strategies. To illustrate, the example of reducing slips and falls in health care facilities will be applied. This is an area...

The U.S. presidential election of 2000 was characterized by alleged ergonomic problems associated with the design of voting ballots. However, this visible event actually exemplified the fact that many apparent ergonomic issues are, in fact, macroergonomic issues. That is, in such cases, there are larger systemic factors at work that interact with a...

Much of the allocation of functions in manufacturing environments has been technologically driven, leaving leftover tasks for humans to perform and failing to consider sociotechnical characteristics. An exploratory experiment is reported that sought a greater empirical understanding of participation in function allocation. The experiment involved s...

This panel will focus upon work systems design from a macroergonomic perspective. The panel will investigate the future of work systems from the viewpoint of: (1) an activity performed by; (2) humans with particular characteristics; (3) in a context. The researchers and practitioners on the panel have focused on one or more of these dimensions of w...

The use of visual telephony is steadily becoming a business necessity. However, human factors issues in video teleconferencing (VTC) work systems can determine whether the benefits of VTC are fully realized. VTC meeting environments are augmented by visual displays, auditory systems, computer hardware and software. This generates complexity of mana...

A symposium, brings together some of the world's most respected researchers and practitioners to discuss the latest methods and tools of macroergonomics. Specific sessions include: Introduction to Macroergonomics; Knowledge and Service Work Environments; Impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT); Industrial Environments and the Imp...

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems promise to improve the overall effectiveness of organizations through integration of all the functionalities within the organizations. Further, within the context of “managing the supply chain”, ERP systems promise to include even more coverage, in essence automating the entire Chain. This is achieved thro...

The authors propose 12 steps, guided by sociotechnical systems theory, to avoid dys-functional practices and improve bench-marking. Policy deployment ensures that the right areas are the focus of the bench-marking effort; many Japanese and U.S. company users are becoming proficient in the practice.

This summary outlines major themes introduced during a multiple-session symposium series devoted to the topic of work design in the 21 st century. The 6 sessions in the series address the future of work design in relation to: (1) macroergonomic analysis of work systems design; (2) production systems design and automation of work; (3) human actors r...

Manufacturing and service industries throughout the world are continuously finding methods to remain lean and profitable. This process had accelerated the globalization of manufacturing facilities. The motto “determine the most effective way of producing” has driven these efforts. The results are a change from a “production and operations managemen...

Ergonomics has traditionally focused on improving such indices as productivity, health and safety, and quality of work life. Such improvements are necessary to individuals and organizations, but may not be sufficient, as emphasized by the recent focus on community ergonomics and other “macrosystem” concerns. Ergonomists have begun to apply their te...

Macroergonomics, which emerged historically after sociotechnical systems theory, quality management, and ergonomics, is presented as the basis for a needed integrative methodology. A macroergonomics methodology was presented in some detail to demonstrate how aspects of microergonomics, total quality management (TQM), and sociotechnical systems (STS...

A study of the effects of increased levels of automation on the human operator illustrates the use of a computer-based approach to the use of verbal protocols as data in skill-based tasks, such as printed circuit board inspection. Subjects provided very detailed protocols at four automation levels, as well as generating performance and preference d...

Consistent with the precepts of total quality control and total quality management, there has been a resource shift from incoming and outgoing inspection processes to statistical quality control of processes. Furthermore, process control operators are responsible for their own quality, necessitating the in-process inspection of components. This stu...