UK MCA: Most common performance influencing factors

PIFs can make human error more likely, which can lead to errors and incidents. These factors affect the way information is processed as well as the way decisions are made. By mitigating or controlling these PIFs, you can improve performance and increase safety. UK MCA explores a few common PIFs that may affect seafarers and presents them as follows: 

Fatigue spans the spectrum of individual, job, and organisation related factors. Fatigue refers to extreme mental and physical exhaustion. It’s not the same as tiredness.

Tiredness is a temporary state that you can recover from quickly with rest. Fatigue is an overwhelming sense of tiredness that is prolonged and cannot be recovered from quickly. Many factors can cause fatigue, such as a lack of quality sleep or stress.

Fatigue has several mental and physical effects, many of which can affect your ability to do a job safely. These effects can be:

• difficulty concentrating
• difficulty making decisions
• lack of motivation
• poor memory, coordination and concentration, and slower reactions
• low mood, irritability or mood swings
• falling asleep suddenly and without meaning to
• reduced amount and quality of communication

Other physical effects that may reduce performance, as well as having long-term health effects include:

• loss of appetite
• headaches
• nausea
• shortness of breath
• muscle pain or weakness
• palpitations

Fatigue can impair performance and decision making, making incidents more likely to happen. Sleep debt can be built if you do not have enough good-quality sleep, even for a short period of time. It can lead to issues with decision making and problem solving, as well as an increase in risk-taking behaviour. Therefore, it needs to be managed and mitigated like any other risk.

Managing fatigue in the workplace

Manage fatigue onboard

• Ensure rest areas are comfortable – quiet, cool, and dark.
• Ensure good watch schedule planning, maintenance, and any other work. Consider when your team can have their hours of both rest and sleep.
• Try to prioritise rest hours, especially if there has been an emergency, problem or situation that has led to your team being fatigued.
• When planning training exercises or drills, try to arrange them so there’s little disruption to rest periods.
• Encourage your team to practise good sleep hygiene and that the causes, effects, and mitigations of fatigue is well understood.
• Uninterrupted rest periods are important – other staff (including shoreside staff) should facilitate this. If you notice that you or your team are fatigued, work to manage it.
• Make sure everyone is recording hours of work and rest accurately – working beyond these hours is a “routine violation” (see section 2.3) and cultural change may be needed to address this.

Stress is our reaction to feeling under pressure. It’s usually thought of as being negative but that is not always the case. Some stress and pressure are necessary in our lives to make us feel motivated and to allow us to feel a sense of satisfaction. However, when the pressure becomes more than we can cope with we can feel overwhelmed and burnt out.

Positive stress is called eustress. Causes of eustress can include receiving a promotion, holidays and retiring. It can be noticed as someone with increased energy, focus, motivation, productivity, and a positive mood.

Negative stress is called distress. Causes of stress can include conflict with your colleagues, excessive demands at work, job insecurity, lack of training for a task, unproductive and time-consuming meetings.

Symptoms of negative stress

• Tiredness and fatigue.
• Low motivation, energy and focus.
• Shortness of breath.
• Nausea.
• Breathlessness.
• Palpitations.
• Mood swings.
• Poor mental health.
• Lack of libido.
• Back pain.

Managing mental health

If you’re concerned about a member of your team and want to speak to them about mental health, as a leader, you can:

• choose somewhere quiet where you will not be interrupted by other people to talk
• use open-ended questions such as: “How are you feeling?”
• let them say as much or as little as they want to
• just listen – do not try and diagnose them or guess at what you think they might be feeling
• avoid any judgement or judgemental language
• encourage them to seek help and support them through this. You can signpost them to company or external resources for mental health. You might need to do some research beforehand to know what is available

What leaders can do

Ensure your team understands the mental health policy and resources such as Employee Assistance Program (EAP). Another resource is The Well-being at Sea tool, which is a digital survey that is completed by seafarers. It provides practical advice on how to manage or improve well-being at sea. The anonymised data it collects are sent to managers to help them identify priority areas for improvement and highlight best practice.

• Ensure staff complete relevant mental health training to eliminate misconceptions.
• Encourage open conversation about mental well-being, which is easier if your staff understand that they will not be penalised for expressing their concerns.
• Monitor mental well-being with satisfaction surveys, productivity, absenteeism etc.
• Ensure workloads are reasonable and that seafarers are not over or underloaded with tasks.

High and low workload

Workload refers to the demands of a task. The mental and physical resources a person has available for any task is limited and can vary between people. When workload is too high or too low, performance can be negatively affected. Job-related pressures that increase mental workload include:

• time pressure
• switching between tasks
• task demands
• time on task
• task complexity

Workload can also change over the course of a shift. Underload can be as dangerous as overload and switching between levels of workload can also cause issues.

Certain activities can add excessive pressure on the seafarers (for example, inspections). It’s important to identify these times and to get extra help as necessary.

Individual and job factors such as competence and training can impact a person’s ability to manage workload. So, it’s important to make sure that you and your team have all the necessary training you need before undertaking any work, especially if it’s new, changed in process or equipment used or is unfamiliar.

It’s also important to have open communication with your team to ensure that they can speak up if they feel that they are struggling with any part of their work or feel as if they are being underloaded with tasks. Likewise, it’s also necessary for you to know your team well and look out for any team members to make sure they are not being underloaded or overloaded with tasks.

The physical limitations of humans also need to be considered. The majority of sensory information the brain receives is through sight. As such, we tend to rely too much on eyesight, sometimes ignoring other cues that tell us something is wrong because we cannot “see” the danger. This can particularly be the case during duties such as watchkeeping. It’s important to be aware of some of the issues that affect what we see.