Field Insights

Dive into the context and conditions of everyday operations to understand work as normal.

From conversations to ethnographic research methods, Field Insights directly engage with workers at the frontline within their operations to build an accurate picture of normal work.

Undertaking Field Insights will help leaders see how your organisation creates success in this everyday work, what potential roadblocks there are to achieving this, and the conditions and context that influence actions, behaviours and decisions.

How Field Insights help the work

Field Insights provide an understanding of how people at various levels within the organisation get their work activities done (usually successfully). As well as insights where failures are possible or more likely. The insights provide:

  • Company decision makers with an independent and reflective view of everyday operations;
  • The proximity of operations to risks and hazards, and thresholds to recover from unintended consequences;
  • Occasions and reasons when planned and actual work differ; and
  • An idea of how safety and risk, efficiencies and inefficiencies are produced within the organisation on a daily basis.

Field Insights present an opportunity to develop a valuable complementary perspective to incident prevention. This is achieved by helping organisations learn from and understand everyday work. In this way, they are a proactive operational activity.

Getting started with Field Insights

Field Insights utilise several different methods to examine the performance of humans and organisations and their interactions in an operational context. The insights result from directly engaging with the key stakeholders in their varied roles. These roles include the workers, supervisors, engineers, site, and senior managers. Further, the methods involve work observations, conversations and reviewing company documents.

The data is analysed using quantitative and qualitative analysis methods. For instance, statistical analysis, document analysis and thematic analysis. After that, the outcomes can then presented, outlining the key findings, learnings, conclusions, and recommendations for improvement.

Download the Better Questions Guide

This guide has been developed to provide you with practical assistance in using better questions to gain better insights into operations.

Download the Better Questions Guide from HOPLAB