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To your opinion the crews tend to fail to follow adhere to the SOP why?
Important question and one that I often think about.
The other posters on this thread seem to be professionals in CRM or Human Factors....I am just an interested line pilot who gets the 6 monthly one day course.
One thing that I have noticed is that the attitude of the crews is heavily influenced by the how much the company invests in the crews in terms of training and also if the crews feel like the job is a long term prospect. At national flag carriers I get the feeling that crews feel it is worth while keeping up with changes and complying to SOP's because they are going to be there for a long while. While at contract jobs pilots seem more prone to running a mix of what they know and what the company expects.
I used to think that "company culture" was a silly buzz phrase but after moving through several carriers I see it is a very important and influential thing.
If a procedure is cumbersome or does not fit the flow of the work being done, or if the procedure actually hampers normal operations it is likely to be disregarded.
I agree. The crews are often under pressure to achieve things that are conflicting. For example, they are under pressure to turn around the aircraft in 30 minutes, and at the same time they are under pressure to comply with SOP's. Often you can only achieve one at the expense of the other. Now the correct thing to do in this situation is to run late in my opinion. But that goes against a lot of peoples personalities, so SOP's are compromised by shortening up briefings, walk-arounds, MEL implementations, rushing checklists, doing things out of order etc.
I think the company carries a lot of the responsibility in the above scenario which is played out thousands of times a day around the world. The pressure to carry out four 30 min turn arounds in one shift is immediate and the consequences of not achieving it are also immediate and obvious. The pressure to rigidly follow SOP's is there....but it's not so immediate and obvious. (ops will not ring you and ask if you are rigidly following your sop's, you won't get an email at home if you are a bit sloppy with your sop's, you won't loose your landing slot, the cabin crew won't complain, the pax won't complain your wife won't complaain etc)So the tech crew have to have a good understanding of the purpose of SOP's and their importance in order to not pay more heed to the pressure of the schedule.
So to answer your question, I think in some circumstances the crew don't follow sop's due to
a) conflicting company pressure and
b) lack of training/understanding re SOP purpose and importance...................................