Most workplace safety training is focused on getting employees to be “on alert”, but fails to teach what being “on alert” means in the context of their own worksite. This is the critical oversight that causes so many safety programs to be compliant but ineffective, and hazard recognition and communication training to be forgotten shortly after it is learned.
Employees who see a one-hour lecture with a hazmat slide deck presentation followed by a multiple choice test do not gain the kind of awareness that allows them to make smarter observations on the job. They memorize the slides long enough to pass a test and forget most of it soon after.
The good news is that you can build effective, lasting training around the theme of situational awareness by considering the following strategies.
Create a working scale for awareness based on hazards
Before designing any safety program, make sure you have a job hazard analysis of the work to be performed. Avoid using generalized industry standards developed by a compliance vendor; create a custom analysis for your team’s work at a specific floor, yard or machine.
A warehouse forklift driver at the loading dock has different awareness needs from a field service technician or a confined space entry crew. If your awareness training mentions nothing specific to the hazards of your team, then your workers understand that the program is not about actually helping them do their work safely.
Designing a program around an actual job hazard analysis gives you talking points for every lesson and creates an awareness foundation that your employees can refer to in their own work regularly and throughout their careers. Most importantly, when an auditor asks whether your safety program meets compliance standards, you’ll have specific points of reference about your worksite’s identified hazards and your team’s awareness training materials.
Give employees a working scale for their own awareness
One of the reasons employees’ awareness tends to oscillate between “inattentive” and “panicked” is because they never learned about the value of staying in “the space in between”. The color coding system of Cooper’s Awareness Model helps them understand that there’s an appropriate awareness level for every task depending on how imminent a hazard is: white is unaware, yellow is relaxed but aware, orange is focusing on potential and active threats, and red is a direct response to imminent danger.
The goal is not to keep workers in orange for their entire shift, since this awareness level is exhausting to sustain. However, they should be comfortable “driving around in yellow” for most tasks, paying attention but not fixated on one item. The color coding becomes valuable to frontline supervisors as well: now, instead of telling someone to “always be aware”, they can direct workers to “go to yellow”, and when to upgrade to orange or red.
Practice the baseline, not just the danger
It’s hard to spot an irregularity when you’re unfamiliar with regularity. That’s why baseline safety training is so important: it teaches workers to recognize patterns and identify deviations such as the unusual presence or the absence of personnel, equipment or process steps.
Once a baseline is established, its deviations become “warning signs”: irregularities that almost always appear before an incident or breakdown occur. Most warning signs are easy to spot, but go unnoticed simply because workers have never been trained to look for them. This is why establishing a baseline is so critical: it directs workers’ awareness towards these warning signs so that they can be recognized and acted upon promptly.
Address complacency among your most experienced people
New hires are often safer during their first few months: they haven’t developed the same level of complacency as more experienced workers who have worked the same processes for years. New employees tend to be more observant and careful and less likely to accept unsafe shortcuts. And yet, this caution often doesn’t last long: it can be dismissed as “inexperienced” behaviour, putting new employees on a faster path to becoming “seasoned” but less safety-conscious.
A lecture-style awareness training will most likely not resonate with long-tenured employees, but they often respond well to case studies: most notably, true stories from a similar workplace where a seemingly innocuous hazard eventually led to an incident. Another great tool for reducing complacency-related incidents is job rotation: it allows employees to be exposed to processes performed by their peers, interrupting the development of automatic habits. Complacency thrives on routine; disrupt it by exposing workers to a peer’s work processes regularly and they’ll become much more receptive to situational awareness training.
Build the skill under pressure, not on a slide
Awareness is not a skill that’s developed by watching a slide deck. It’s a decision-making capability that’s best honed through a series of scenarios that require the observe-decide-act cycle in an environment that simulates real-life pressures. That’s where scenario-based awareness training comes in; it’s what most internal programs lack, and what outside vendors such as Stand2 offer in the form of tailored scenario design and execution.
The OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) created by military strategist John Boyd is an excellent framework for scenario design, but most awareness training programs are content to have employees Observe a hazard and Act upon it. What they fail to recognize is that it’s the Decide step that’s the most taxing for the employees, and that it needs to be practiced in order to hone employees’ awareness under pressure.
Manage attention like a scarce resource
Fatigue is a hazard that doesn’t often make the headlines, but it contributes to thousands of incidents and injuries every year. It is a significant contributor to safety incidents in general: fatigued workers are much more likely to make mistakes and expose themselves to hazards. That’s why every comprehensive safety program will have elements of fatigue management, including managing attention as a scarce resource.
The OODA Loop above is a great tool for teaching employees to allocate their attention wisely, especially when it comes to the Decide step. Workers need to prioritize hazards based on how soon they’re going to cause an incident. Fatigue is a hazard that they may not immediately recognize as such, but that should be managed like any other imminent hazard. If an employee is exhausted and their ability to manage multiple tasks and make complex decisions is impaired, they need to be encouraged to make fewer decisions and reduce their workload until they’ve had sufficient rest.
Human factors engineering research has identified several ways that multitasking impairs situational awareness: most notably, by restricting a worker’s cognitive bandwidth. An employee who hasn’t slept well or is managing too many simultaneous tasks has a severely reduced capacity for attention allocation. This means that their situational awareness is artificially diminished: in effect, they are unable to observe as many variables as a rested and focused worker would be able to do. Attention management training is critical, especially when employees are working longer shifts, and should be part of any awareness training program.
One of the easiest ways to help employees prioritize their attention is to give them a verbal checklist of items to look out for. The STOP technique (Stop, Think, Observe, Plan) is an excellent example: it guides a worker through a five-second safety refocus before undertaking a potentially hazardous task or in the middle of a shift. Verbal checklists at the next shift change also help the workers transition from one task to another: they allow a worker to verbally confirm the previous steps with their supervisor or peer instead of going straight to the next task.
Make sure warnings always get heard
A hazard warning that only gets announced but not acknowledged may as well not be delivered at all. This is the idea behind closed-loop communications: a warning, instruction or order is issued, and the recipient acknowledges it, thus confirming that they’ve received it.
It may seem simplistic, but it’s an extremely powerful situational awareness tool that is often neglected in safety programs. A pre-task briefing in which a team member confirms their role and relevant hazards identifies weaknesses in a written task list. Similarly, a team safety briefing at the start or the end of a shift can be an effective way to confirm that all team members understand their roles and responsibilities, the identified hazards and how to respond to them.
It’s also critical to make sure that closed-loop communication is a regular part of your team’s operations: when they become routine, they stop being a special procedure and become the new normal. This is especially important for effective awareness around hazard recognition and communication: it means that employees have regular opportunities to verbally acknowledge hazards or receive instructions about them.
Closed-loop communications also rely on a sense of psychological safety: employees should feel safe reporting or asking about any potential hazard without fear of reprisal, especially when it comes to violating procedures. Situational awareness and closed-loop communication training go hand in hand with building a positive safety culture: if employees are not comfortable with acknowledging potential hazards formally, no number of training sessions will convince them that doing so is a good idea.
Keep the training alive after completion
It’s a well-known but often overlooked fact that attention fades with time. Situational awareness is a skill that requires refreshing, and a one-time training followed by an annual certification is a disservice to employees.
Microlearning holds attention better by delivering information in small, frequent doses. It’s an excellent way to ensure that hazard recognition and communication skills remain sharp, which should be complemented by unscheduled drills for emergency response procedures. An employee who practices safety procedures on a regular but infrequent basis can go months without practicing an emergency response, and the sudden urgency of the drill may not be entirely effective.
Measuring situational awareness should be done in ways that reflect your employees’ abilities to recognize hazards and communicate them effectively. Injury rates are an extremely important metric but are often a lagging indicator, meaning that they tell you what has already happened and how to avoid it in the future. Near-miss incident reports, supervisor observations about hazard recognition and communication skills and adherence to communication procedures during shift changes are great ways to measure improvements. In other words, your safety program should measure leading indicators rather than lagging ones.
Finally, keep in mind that your employees’ lives depend on your situational awareness training being truly effective. Mortality rates are sobering: over 5,000 workers lost their lives in work-related incidents in a single year, on average. A comprehensive training regimen around recognizing and communicating hazards is essential to reducing those numbers. Any situational awareness training that only talks about being “aware” but is not designed around observing and acting in a timely manner is a waste of resources.
