Combating complacency

Complacency in the workplace can have dire – and gruesome – consequences. Just ask Jack Jackson.

“I picked up seven fingers off the floor when I worked in the automotive industry,” said Jackson, now a senior safety consultant with SafeStart. “Everyone (on the manufacturing line) knew the rule: Never try to free up a jam with the guard open, a finger on the trigger and the hose connected. And yet everyone had done it.

“Several of them admitted to doing it in the past, but they just never got caught. People began to ignore the hazards.”

Jackson describes complacency as “the act of doing routine tasks without thinking about it,” adding that the issue is particularly difficult because “even the best of us get complacent.”
It can happen, the National Safety Council adds, simply by letting your guard down, losing focus or not looking for the hazards. Being in a state of complacency, also known as being in “autopilot” mode, can increase the risk of injury on the job, regardless of worker age or experience level.

In a 2021 survey of more than 300 NSC member organizations, “safety complacency among workers” ranked No. 1 – alongside “employee engagement in safety and health” – for most pressing safety and health issue in the workplace.

How workers become complacent

Complacency usually is an unintentional byproduct of worker habits as well as being ill-informed about hazards and risks, according to ProAct Safety CEO Shawn Galloway, who works with numerous clients to address the problem.

“Often when somebody gets injured, they meant to be doing what they were doing,” Galloway said. “They just didn’t mean for it to turn out the way it did.”

He offered the example of a worker opening a valve with a wrench and pulling the tool toward their face because they’ve done it that way for years and never gotten hurt. A worker’s previous experiences of performing a task without injury create a perception that the action is safe. “We define success as not getting hurt, so ‘anything that I do that doesn’t get me hurt must be safe,’” Galloway said.

In addition, if they don’t see or know the risks associated with a job or task, workers become desensitized to it. In some cases, Galloway points out, leaders don’t talk to employees about the risks or safety conversations are delegated to safety professionals.

Regardless of how complacency comes about for workers, it’s not an issue for the “someday file,” Galloway said. “You have to keep these issues fresh.”

Paula Gold-Williams, president and CEO of Texas-based CPS Energy, said complacency feeds off moments when workers feel they’ve got their tasks down pat.

“We like people to feel conscious in the moment so they’re deliberate and they really are paying attention to all of their surroundings,” she said.

How organizations can act

Complacency can occur at the organizational level, too.

“From the company perspective, it’s just acceptance of the status quo,” Galloway explained. “It’s a perception that, ‘We’re good.’ I have a lot of conversations with leadership about this issue.”
He recommends looking at whether complacency exists within a system or is related to one outlying individual. “If it’s a company issue, is this because they have a false sense of success?” Galloway asked.

When organizations say they’re good in terms of safety, it can be an invitation to dig deeper, in many cases. “How they’ve defined ‘good’ has been, unfortunately, skewed or only measured by incident rates,” Galloway said.

Warning signs of complacency are often quite evident. “They come in the form of close calls or near misses,” Jackson said.

Such incidents are valuable learning opportunities for employers.
“What some companies fall into is a trap that they adopt a best practice, then they stop looking for a better way,” Galloway said. “There’s always going to be a better way. You always have to be constantly learning.”

He recommends that employers investigate their safety successes just as vigorously as their failures.

“That’s a huge common thing that I find,” Galloway said. “They can’t just be learning from failures. They become complacent when not focusing on value creation.”

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When empowerment arrives

At CPS Energy, leadership launched an initiative that gives all employees the authority to stop work if they deem it unsafe.

“Even as the CEO, I can’t trump that,” Gold-Williams said.

For instance, when a frontline employee stopped Gold-Williams for spending too much time looking at her cellphone, her immediate reaction was, “Oh, I got it. I got it.”

Then, she realized she hadn’t responded properly.

“I stopped myself and I thanked them,” she said. “You’ve got to give people that authority and then acknowledge that. They’ve got to see real examples.”

Leadership reinforcement is key to empowering workers, Gold-Williams said.

“We’ve got to get that empowerment in their hands on the front lines,” she said. “Management should own ensuring the reinforcement and giving that authority away.”

That also goes for newer employees stopping the work of senior colleagues.

“Time frame doesn’t matter in terms of keeping the public safe and keeping each other safe,” Gold-Williams said.

The importance of communication

At one of Jackson’s previous jobs, leadership communicated with workers via what he calls a “spray and pray” strategy.

“Spray the walls with posters and pray somebody reads them,” he said. “After one or two times, you don’t pay attention” to the posters – or their message.

At a time when workers are being peppered with information throughout their day – including cellphone notifications as well as electronic road signs and billboards before they even get to work – leadership must be creative in getting its messages across and making it stick to combat complacency.

Jackson suggests rotating signage to different areas of a workplace and changing the wording frequently.

One of Galloway’s clients has found the best way to get safety messages across to their employees is by displaying the messages on the inside of bathroom stall doors. “They call it ‘The Porcelain Press,’” he said with a laugh.

At CPS Energy, an effort called “meeting in a box” has been a valuable communication tool. The leadership team shares articles of safety-related situations in the utility industry, such as a recent serious incident involving a crane.

“As leaders, we said, ‘We haven’t seen this particular situation, but why don’t we share it with the organization?’” Gold-Williams said.

Each article is broken down into a one-page document that describes the situation and includes bullet points highlighting key preventive measures. The goal is for a two-way discussion to grow throughout the organization.

“We let the organization teach management about what’s practical and how we can do things better,” Gold-Williams said. “That diminishes the impact of people becoming complacent.”

Large or small, a solution for all

Organizations of all sizes can find solutions to disrupting complacency. “It’s not about flashy programs and pretty models on a screen,” Gold-Williams said. “It’s just the conscious thought of engaging people and treating them with the most consideration that you have.”

One-on-one conversations with employees likely will be easier for smaller employers, according to Gold-Williams, who points out that “a robust conversation” with employees about safety and complacency is free.

Whether your organization is large or small, “Your team members want to know that you care,” Gold-Williams said. “The commonality is people.”