Inattention sets us up for a safety glitch
Deliberate inattention at work can be costly. One split second of inattention, and your safety record is shattered, an employee is injured, equipment is damaged, and your productivity takes a dip.
Distractions from dozens of sources are always competing with the job at hand.
- The National Safety Council calls the use of cell phones behind the wheel of a moving vehicle "inattention blindness."
- In construction, electrocution is the second leading cause of fatalilty, almost always due to a moment of inattention, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
- "It is a well known bias of human judgment to commit the 'fundamental attribution error,' to vastly overrate human factors to vastly underrate situation factors when trying to explain why events have occurred," according to workplace experts Marc Green and John Senders.
Here are some tips to help your employeees keep their brains from blinking off and causing an injury.
- Let your employees know what you're doing to keep human error from becoming tragic
- Check the size, placement, color, wording of all warning signs and change them to make them sharp and clear
- Add down-home, company-specific photos, quotes, statistics, and other bits of information to make your safety training materials more interesting
- Demonstrate errors rooted in the system that have caused, or nearly caused, injuries in the past.
Griffith Publishing 800 359-9503
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