With most companies now having a set of comprehensive policies and procedures for safety; how important is the need for managing the human factors?

I may be lambasted for this answer but wherever you have human input in a task you need human surveillance and supervision of safety. I agree with James that several environmental or ergonomic factors may reduce awareness of hazards but having been an auditor for many years there is always the one chap who will not put gloves on simply as an act of churlishness and rebellion. Safety systems cannot physically regulate human nature and behavior.

A policy will not prevent an accident , it can be used as a training device for awareness and is important to have . 

The human factor will always need to be managed to eliminate incidents 

one of the top importance listed up, as the work is done by human. Plus this subject should be covered in one of those policies, under BBS.

Great question Sean,

Even the most well trained and experienced employee can make mistakes. I think managing human factors are an integral part to health and safety. Policy's and procedures are great for structure and reference, but human factors always add that unpredictability variable. 

As an employer we are responsible to design the job/task around human factors such as;

• physical capability
• fatigue
• stress/morale
• work overload/underload
• motivation                                                                            

One way to minimize the room for error is by simplifying tasks and procedures. Even through all this planning and management, employee violations still occur. Violations of procedures are not usually caused by a total disregard to the policy and procedures. Most of the time it's because employees do not agree with the current procedure and found a more efficient way. Mitigate this by including them in the development process of creating procedures. 

Another way to minimize human error is to put engineered controls into place, for example guards around moving parts, or barricades.

To sum things up human factors can be identified and managed. We should rigorously include identifying where human errors can occur in safety sensitive tasks, the influencing factors that might make it more likely, and controls measures to prevent it.

That is all I have on managing human factors. Some of this information was found from my studies, research on the internet, and past experience.