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In the workplace, that can be a deadly mistake.
What can you do to keep workers from relaxing their guard in ways that put them and their coworkers at risk? How can you fight complacency in your workplace?
Attention and Focus
Complacency is, at its heart, a lack of attention. Attention is a tricky thing to command; we can only really pay attention to one thing at a time. Humans, studies are showing us, do not actually multitask. We switch our attention from one thing to another rapidly, but we don’t pay attention to more than one thing at a time. A worker who has become complacent has let his or her attention wander from the most important thing—the task at hand—to some other topic.
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Even brief periods of inattention can have disastrous consequences. In a study published in 2013 by researchers at Michigan State University, workers were asked to complete a series of tasks in a specific order and then were distracted for as little as 2.8 seconds by another task assigned by researchers. When the workers returned to their initial task, they often returned to a different point in the task sequence without realizing it and inadvertently skipped or redid steps. A distraction that lasted just 2.8 seconds doubled the likelihood that the participants would commit an error, while a distraction that lasted 4.4 seconds tripled the number of mistakes.
So, how can you get workers to focus on the thing that is actually the most important at any given time?
Eliminating Distractions
Some distractions are easy to identify and relatively easy to control. The distraction of texting while driving can be eliminated—at least during working hours—by putting policies in place that support workers in putting their phones away and just driving while they’re behind the wheel.
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Other distractions are harder to identify and harder to control. Workers who are distracted because they’re in the middle of a nasty divorce, for example, may not even talk about their personal situations at work. But, if that’s the reason they’re not paying attention to what they’re doing, it could end up being the reason someone gets hurt.
In either case, workers need to understand that when they’re at work, they need to be at work—fully present and focused on the job. Be sure to tell them that not all distractions are pocket-sized and electronic; any time a worker is distracted, he or she should take enough time to get his or her head together before someone gets hurt.
Tomorrow we’ll look at some specific distractions in the workplace and how to deal with them.