Human error is exactly as it says on the tin. We are all capable of making mistakes as no one is perfect and can act without flaws. The same is also true in the workplace. Though, these mistakes can be a little more fatal and costly.
Adrian Harvey, the CEO of Elephants Don’t Forget, commented that “in the UK, human error in the workplace costs lives and hundreds of millions of pounds every year.” To look into this, Elephants Don’t Forget have published a whitepaper into this and the research surrounding it. As a solution, the paper investigates how firms could deploy AI to help employees avoid these mistakes.
The categories of human error
Investigating errors within businesses, no matter how they were caused, is crucial because of the implications and cost. And this furthers into many things – cost of reputation, actual monetary cost to the company, cost of time spent amending the error, and more.
From this, we can use Cost Per Error (CPE) to monitor exactly that. This, as the whitepaper attests, varies by sector and firm. However, the bottom line, no matter what the CPE is, errors should be managed and handled efficiently.
Following research into alternative perspectives and how they can be applied to the workplace, the whitepaper deciphers three categories of human error. These three are sub-categories from the overarching issue of ‘unintentional errors’. Although they may be accidental and without intent, they still exist. These are as follows:
#1 Momentary lapses of concentration
This is an issue that may be out of an employer or leader’s hands. This could be caused by distraction, fatigue, trailing thoughts non-work related, and more.
#2 Mistakes
This can be defined as actions that an employee performs consciously, believing it was correct. However, the act becomes a mistake when that conscious act was actually the wrong thing to do in the circumstance. Elephants Don’t Forget argues that these errors are, although the most common, the easiest to fix.
#3 Rule-breaking
The whitepaper categories this as an intentional, wilful mistake. For example, an employee knowing what they should do, but actively choosing not to.
How do we start to fix human error within businesses?
Fixing errors and helping employees learn from their mistakes is vital, and is tied to business transformation. You can grow with understanding of problem-solving, and learning more. Why not make error reduction part of your work culture?
Looking closely at the three categories of unintentional human error, AI can actually be used to help reduce all of them. Human error is, as stated before, natural and exactly that – part of being human. Maybe it’s now time to implement AI to remove the human touch in areas where it’s costly to your business.
Keep your human employees to keep the experience real and authentic. Alternatively, utilise the power of technology and artificial intelligence to fix the wrongdoings that we make. Let’s make our lives and business acts easier through clever technologies.
Time for AI to step in!
One of these AI solutions which can assist this issue, is the implementation of Elephants Don’t Forget’s ‘Clever Nelly’. Nelly is a knowledge retention tool and is based on the same training tools used on your human employees.
With employees only have an average knowledge level of 52%, Nelly can help to repair individual employee knowledge gaps. Without risk of human error, Nelly will be able to aid your employees’ drive and performance and fill in their competency gaps.
Nelly can also focus on ‘target error(s)’ to rectify gaps driving the mistake, and maintain competence. This will ensure that employees won’t fall back into past errors and misjudgments. There’s many benefits and necessities for wanting to fix and bypass errors in business. It will aid your CPE and overall loss of profit, and boost employee morale when they know they are making less mistakes.
So why not implement an AI tool to help this? You can find out more about ‘Clever Nelly’ and how this solution can aid your business by reading more in the whitepaper.
Download the Elephants Don’t Forget human error whitepaper from here today. Learn more to help your organisation!