Fighting Complacency
We all become complacent with the hazards we have to deal with on a day to day basis.
We all know that complacency is a big contributing factor when it comes to people getting hurt. But just how big is it? How often is complacency—leading to mind not on task—a contributing factor when it comes to acute injuries? Moreover, what can you do to fight it?
To answer the first question, “How often is complacency a factor?”, it’s probably best to just think about yourself and the times you’ve been hurt because you know whether you were thinking about what you were doing or not. Most of us (as adults) have been hurt thousands and thousands of times, if you count all the bumps, bruises, cuts and scrapes, we’ve experienced.
Granted, 70%–80% of these happened before we were 12 or 13, but most adults are still hard pressed to go a month without a visible bruise, cut or scrape. So, even if you’re only getting hurt about 20 times a year, that’s still hundreds (or thousands) since you’ve been old enough to remember the contributing factors. Now, just ask yourself, “How many times have I been hurt when I was thinking about what I was doing and the risk of what I was doing at the exact instant when I got hurt?”
If you’re like most people, the answer is zero or very close to it!
Think about it
We all become complacent with the hazards we have to deal with on a day to day basis. Once you get used to the way things are, it’s hard to treat the hazards with the same fear, apprehension and respect you did initially. Once things seem normal to you, once the fear and apprehension are no longer pre-occupying or totally pre-occupying, it’s easy enough for anybody’s mind to wander. . . just think about driving. When you first started to drive, going 60 mph was totally preoccupying (I didn’t even want the radio on the first time I was behind the wheel going 60).
But, how long did it take you before you were driving with one hand on the wheel? How long before the radio was cranked to the max, or (and here’s a serious one to think about if you have kids just learning to drive), how long did it take you before you fell asleep or almost fell asleep at 60–70 mph? If you’re like most people, it happened within the first 5 years.
How do you fight complacency?
Well, if everything seems normal to you, then you have to ask yourself if what you’re doing normally or automatically or habitually is safe. For example, moving your eyes before you move your body, hands, feet or car. Testing your footing when getting out of your car before you commit your weight to it, etc. In other words, we have to get people to put some effort into improving some of their habits.
In order to fight complacency you have to do something actively that gets you thinking about the hazards and risks of the task/job. The key is active involvement on the shop floor. Active involvement and participation at a safety meeting is good (don’t get me wrong), but it’s not the same as meaningful safety related activity where the work is and where the hazards are. This is one of the reasons that many companies (thousands of worksites) have adopted an observation and hazard identification process.
What can you do?
If you start watching other people for the state to error risk patterns (see picture below), then every time you see it, it will automatically pull your mind back into the ball game.
Watching other people for state to error risk patterns does two things:
- It helps to keep you from getting hurt if that person makes a critical error
- It helps to pull your mind back into the ball game, or task at hand.
So, there are things a company can do and there are things each and every one of us can do to fight complacency leading to mind not on task:
- We can work on improving our habits with eyes on task, body position out of the line-of-fire, testing footing or grip before committing our weight to it, etc.
- We can look at others for state to error risk patterns to increase our awareness of where we are right now and what we are doing.
However, these techniques will only help fight complacency if people actually put some effort into them.
But that effort will be worth it because anything you do that truly helps you fight complacency will lead to reduced injuries in the workplace and reduced vehicle collisions on the highway.