Diagnosing the root cause is usually the first step companies take after an incident occurs. According to the National Safety Council (NSC), the top three leading causes of preventable injury-related death—poisoning, falls, and motor vehicle accidents—account for 86% of all preventable deaths. While complacency isn’t specifically named as a cause, what are the chances that those who were involved in these incidents did not know the risks of poisoning, falls or driving a motor vehicle?
When people are in a state of complacency, they aren’t thinking about the risks waiting to harm them. Although complacency wasn’t cited as the direct cause, it’s safe to assume that it was a contributing factor in a large number of those incidents. Most people are aware of how complacency affects them, and companies have identified complacency as a problem that contributes to incidents in their facilities.
However, even though organizations are aware that their employees are being affected by complacency, they are often quick to overlook it as a contributing factor, instead citing more prominent causes.
Which raises the question: Is complacency an organizational choice?
A new guide on the subject explains individual and organizational complacency using real-world examples, provides insights into the contributing factors and gives a high-level overview of what organizations can do about complacency.
According to Fighting Familiarity: Overcoming Complacency in the Workplace: “By not doing something to proactively mitigate complacency—like regularly practicing habits, following rules or doing things to offset the complacency—you’re essentially choosing to let complacency influence your company’s safety outcomes and deliberately operating at an increased level of risk.”
One journal paper highlighted in the guide shows that complacency is a neurological function of the brain. Understanding how complacency works is the first step to overcoming it in the workplace. There are a lot of contributing factors to the complacency that people may not realize they are experiencing.
Transferable complacency
Transferable complacency is something that can spread within an organization. If a task feels similar to something someone has done countless times, it will make that person feel comfortable in the new task. And since the new task feels familiar, the complacency that would be experienced in the old task may transfer to the new task.
Inexperience is another form of transferable complacency, especially if veteran workers are downplaying the risks to new workers. On its own, inexperience comes with a lack of knowledge or skill, which ultimately can increase the risk of errors. But with experienced workers talking down the risks associated with the job, the transferable complacency from the veteran’s own disconnect with the hazards is assumed by the new workers.
Other contributing factors can include a lack of engagement (the level of enthusiasm employees feel for their job), familiarity/repetition (which can lead to overconfidence) and unchallenging work (causes a false sense of security).
If you haven’t thought about how to mitigate the complacency affecting your workers, could you have fallen under the complacency spell? The new Fighting Familiarity: Overcoming Complacency in the Workplace guide will illustrate what complacency is, explain individual and organizational complacency using real-world examples, provide insights into the contributing factors and give a high-level overview of what your organization can do about it.