Human Factors Practitioner

Brighton, England, United Kingdom

7/23/2025

Closing Date

20/08/2025

Job Title: Human Factors Practitioner

Location: Falmer- Hybrid- Site attendance and flexible working is required to accommodate interviews and investigation with our shift colleagues- It is essential for you to have full driving licence

Perm/FTC: Permanent

Hours: 37

Salary: Ranges from £33,000 to £44,000 per annum depending on skills and experience

Southern Water has recognised that people are complex and that various factors influence their behaviour and performance, ultimately impacting safety and efficiency within the workplace.

Human error has been identified as a significant contributory factor to pollution events and in some cases, has been determined as the root cause. Southern Water is not only committed to reducing its pollutions, but also proactively looking for ways to continuously improve and give all our employees the tools they need to be successful in their roles. This is where your role as the Human Factors Practitioner will be able to make a difference by identifying the required remedial action and sharing these learnings with the wider business for implementation!

Sounds interesting, read further to find out more!

This role focuses on understanding why humans behave and perform the way that they do - how have the many internal and external influences impacted their decision making and how can we best optimise human well-being and performance in the workplace.

Reporting to the Continuous Improvement Manager, you will utilise strong empathetic, listening and communication capabilities to build rapport and trust across the Wastewater function. As part of your fact-finding exercise, you will review pollution and near miss events, carrying out interviews and producing report to identify the appropriate remedial action and continuously review and improve the human factors process in line with business growth

Responsibilities

Whilst the primary purpose of this role is to identify the human factors leading to a pollution or near-miss event, responsibilities can vary and may include:

• Carrying out reactive investigations where human error has been identified as a primary cause of a pollution event (or near miss) using all SW applications and empathy-led interview techniques.
• Collate and build all necessary reports and data packs using human factors findings, providing insight and trends for the wider function, assisting in pollution reduction.
• Raising pollution risks through identification and discussion of findings at regular and wider wastewater meetings, addressing not only incident specific opportunity but also wider/global risk.
• Produce engaging communications sharing ‘learning moments’, championing and fostering a continuous improvement culture, recognising the value of a Human Factors methodology
• Delivery training and promote human factors awareness across the business as and when requested or a need is identified
  
  

Working with the wider performance development, CI and training team, you will identify learning opportunities and feed these into continuous feedback loops, securing as many opportunities for growth and performance improvement as is reasonable/safely possible.

To be successful in this role, you will be confident and engaging communicator with a passion to make a difference by delivering awareness sessions to internal teams, able to build trust, rapport and empathy, being able to solicit honest and open feedback about Human Factors in interviews and produce engaging presentation for a diverse audience and technical skillset. Being an advocate to develop best practices, you will be analytical and will bring in creative thinking to identify opportunities and activities to address sources of Human Factors and consequently facilitate and lead workshops extracting opportunities/challenges and helping the training team to design person-centred, effective and sustainable materials that address identified challenges.

You will have a strong exposure in people engagement skills, we welcome applicants from diverse functional experiences such as HR, social services, academic, forces or relevant consultative background with behaviour assessment being highly advantageous. Your analytical skills will be key in this role working on qualitative data, extract and present the findings to work on improvement plans. It will be great if you have experience working on continuous improvement methodologies, ideally degree qualified in social or behavioural field however we certainly value equivalent level of experience!