Complacency is often listed as a contributing factor when incidents occur. But what are the contributing factors of complacency?
It’s essential to know how to identify complacency because unlike states of mind like rushing, frustration, or fatigue, complacency is almost impossible to notice in the moment. It’s something you recognize as the cause after an incident occurs. That’s why it’s often referred to as the silent killer.
Since complacency often happens in a state of reduced awareness, it’s important to identify the outside factors and conditions that contributed to it. Complacency can have a negative impact on the performance and productivity of workers as well as put them at a higher risk of injury—that’s why it’s important to recognize the contributing factors of complacency.
Familiarity/Repetition
Becoming overly familiar with a task or setting can cause workers to become comfortable with not only the task but also the associated risks. There may even be instances where workers forgo the risk assessment on a job because of their knowledge of the job or another contributing state of mind, like rushing or fatigue, that influences them to think that nothing bad will happen.
Repetitive tasks are ones that workers quickly become familiar with. The monotonous tasks do not feel dangerous, so workers often become less attentive to safety when performing these tasks.
Unchallenging work
Tasks that are viewed as easy or mindless will translate into potential hazards being overlooked. This sense of superiority in completing these tasks can lead to a false sense of security and overconfidence in the job. With any task that doesn’t require much thought, the mind will wander. Mind wandering is often synonymous with complacency.
Lack of engagement
Employee engagement can be described as the level of enthusiasm a worker feels toward their job. This has a direct correlation to safety. If employees are not enthralled by their work, they also won’t be focused on the associated risks, becoming complacent about them.
According to a report by Gallup, engaged employees have 63% fewer safety incidents. That benefit causes a positive feedback loop, “when it comes to safety … people can count the number of times they’ve helped someone else stay safe, removed a hazard or reported a near-miss. If they can see their impact, they’ll be more likely to engage.”
Culture as an example
If other workers develop a lax attitude towards safety and frequently take shortcuts, it won’t take long for that to become the company culture, or, to put it another way, “how work gets done around here.” Clearly, these workers aren’t thinking about potential risks or hazards and are unknowingly spreading complacency throughout the jobsite. For example, workers routinely fail to install guardrails and toeboards around open sides of scaffolding platforms. When new employees are working with experienced workers on a job site with scaffolding, they will be subjected to the culture of skipping guardrails and toeboards. It can be challenging for new workers to go against the grain of workplace culture, even if they’ve been trained properly.
Continued success
There’s a banal phrase in the safety world that accompanies complacency: “We’ve been doing it this way for years and nothing bad has ever happened.” A string of successful projects or effective tasks instills confidence. This mentality is reinforced by the absence of an incident—because nothing has happened, it’s easy to believe it never will. Past successes cause workers to underestimate the potential risks, believing that previous positive outcomes guarantee future safety.
Once a system is in place, it can be tough to remember to check in on it. After all, a plan doesn’t change on its own. But as the people who enact that plan experience new challenges—from deadlines to new team members to organizational change—it’s important to review the systems in place and make sure they aren’t increasing the risk of human factors. By making a habit of regularly checking, you can ensure the roadmap you planned initially doesn’t lead workers into danger.
This blog post is an excerpt adapted from Fighting Familiarity: Overcoming Complacency in the Workplace. It defines complacency, discusses individual and organizational complacency, offers insights into its contributing factors, and provides a straightforward overview of what organizations can do about it. Download it to proactively reduce complacency in your workplace.