Building a Culture of Connection: Managing Human Factors in High-Risk Industries with Susan Sawatzky

This episode of the Safety Spotlight podcast features a conversation with Susan Sawatsky, a human factors and learning design expert. She discusses how the “people part” of safety is often missed in traditional safety management systems, highlighting that true safety comes from understanding people acting in systems.

Susan shares her journey from a teaching career to managing fatigue risks in the Canadian oil and gas industry, which shifted her focus to human risk factors. She delves into the critical topic of fatigue, explaining that its impairment effects are comparable to being legally impaired by alcohol, with someone awake for 21 hours being as impaired as someone with a 0.08 blood alcohol level. Susan discusses how companies can proactively manage fatigue by optimizing work hours, empowering supervisors to recognize signs of fatigue, and educating workers on managing their own sleep cycles and circadian rhythms. She shares a powerful story from a mining company that successfully reduced incidents through an informal “nap” policy and recounts a serious incident at another site that became a “game-changer” for their approach to fatigue management.

The discussion also covers the importance of psychological safety, which Susan clarifies as feeling empowered to speak up in the workplace. She emphasizes that building a respectful workplace and empowering supervisors with conflict management skills are essential for enhancing psychological safety.

Looking to the future, Susan highlights groundbreaking technology she’s piloting: an AI system that can quantitatively detect impairment, including fatigue, from just a six-second voice recording. This innovation provides a non-intrusive way to measure and manage risk and offers workers real-time feedback on their fitness to work. Ultimately, Susan stresses that investing in the mental fitness and well-being of people is as vital as maintaining machinery to achieve overall safety success.