In this installment of EHSDA Shorts, Scott DeBow, CSP, ARM, Principal of Health/Safety & Environmental, Avetta, talks about what factors can impact a worker’s perception of risk.
This clip was taken from a webinar titled “Our Brains on ‘Safety’: What We’re Learning About Better Safety Communications and Why It Matters in Today’s Workforce“, as part of the EHS Daily Advisor Safety Training Week online summit. The full session is available for FREE on-demand here.
The webinar was sponsored by Avetta.
Transcript (edited for clarity):
Question: What factors can impact a worker’s perception of risk?
DeBow: We have a culmination of different pressures on the brain trying to perceive that impacts our thinking and our understanding about risk. And so when our risk perception changes, when there’s the pressure of time, maybe we have 90 minutes to do a certain job and right now that’s been cut down to 45. And then if we don’t finish this job in 45 minutes, we may lose our job. We have some financial pressure. And then along those lines is, this other company may get to work or this other person may be promoted. Now work is conducted in a peer setting. We have peer pressure. These are very real powerful forms of pressure on our brains. And when we combine these things together and work settings that happen every day, a worker’s perception of risk, their tolerance for it, what they might be willing to do, or their perception of how they could get hurt, what they might be willing to do to just keep things going. The risk perception changes and employees are often willing to do more than they should, or normally would, just to get the job done because employees are resourceful.
And in my experience, employees want to get their work done. They want to do well, and in absence of clear direction, will do their best to figure out how to do it. Just like me, just like any other human on the planet. So there’s an interesting part in the brain. There’s a system in the brain called the reticular activation system, or you may have heard it as RAS, but think about it like this. If you’ve ever driven anywhere and you’ve been driving a while and then you get to where you’re going and you realize, “How did I get here? I don’t remember the past 15 minutes.”
So our brain works in a way to tune out highly repeated stimulus. If we’re driving all the time, we hear the same noises, the same sounds in order to process information and allow room for new information, the reticular activation system kicks in and it tunes out noise, it reduces noise or what it might consider irrelevant stimuli, highly repetitive signals and noise signals. Let’s think about the signals in the workforce we experience every day. For me, where this got real is when I was doing one of my claims investigations, back in the day, but it was a claims investigation where we had someone that stepped into the path of a forklift. There were a number of problems with this work design, but the claim of the employee was, “Well, she stepped right backwards into the path of an oncoming forklift.” Terrible injury to her leg in the hospital, just a terrible event. But her claim was “I didn’t hear the forklift” and these forklifts were equipped with beeps and flashing lights.
But this isn’t the only claim I ever investigated. This isn’t the only incident I ever investigated to where people say, “Hey, I didn’t hear the obvious safety device” that was flashing or beeping. And it kept happening, right? Not every day, but a couple times a year in a large workforce. I’m starting to think about things a little bit differently.