Situational Awareness: What Does it Mean to “Pay Attention”?

Our newest webinar, The Three Elements of Situational Awareness, has just gone up! You can watch it here. This article will talk about the points that Alex describes within the video, and expand upon some of his ideas.

The three elements of situational awareness make up a person’s reaction time and understanding of the signals they have been provided with. We constantly process everything we see and hear through these three steps, and they lend themselves to our response. In dangerous fields, situational awareness keeps everyone involved safe. Employees’ quick thinking and intelligent responses can save lives, and often do. But when a lack of situational awareness is a root cause, how can you improve that in your workplace?

It almost seems impossible: situational awareness is all in the head of the observer, how can you train someone to notice things better?

Well, as it turns out, situational awareness has more systemic and environmental roots than simply what takes place within the observer’s mind. Here are the three elements of situational awareness and how you can cultivate them better within your workplace.

Perception

Perception is the first of the elements of situational awareness, referring to the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space. It’s also the part of the awareness process that is most commonly missed. In fact, in a study performed on air traffic controllers, 78% of their mistakes were made due to not perceiving the necessary information.

This is largely due to the amount of distractions and outside factors that can impede perception, including but not limited to:

• Fatigue
• Stress
• Medications
• Technology such as phones, television, or the radio
• Highly automated systems that require less frequent checks

On top of that, time alone impedes perception. Alex describes in this webinar a study that worked to find out when a person stops paying attention. It was found that 87% of subjects caught a signal after 20 minutes, but only 12% caught it after 60 minutes had passed.

While solutions like getting more sleep or taking the necessary steps to decrease stress levels outside of work may be up to the individual, there are a number of distractions that can be removed by the system they operate within. The presence of technology in the workplace can be decreased or refined to necessary signals. Frequent breaks or shifts that keep fresh eyes in the observer’s seat can help to keep attention closer to an 87% success rate. Highly automated systems could have alarms that are more difficult to ignore when the observer needs to make a check.

Perception is where most failures start, and thus directing attention to the right places is important to good human factors design.

Comprehension

Comprehension is the second element of situational awareness, referring to the process of understanding what a perceived signal means. Comprehending meaning is a major aspect of awareness, as it filters the information you have perceived into what about that information is important for you.

As Alex shows in the video, you can often perceive signals that are not a part of your assigned task, and being able to filter which signals should raise alarms for you and which ones you should be able to dismiss is an important aspect of completing a task successfully.

This element is a part of processing the information you have collected. You identify what it is in perception, and decipher what it means through comprehension.

In the study on air traffic controllers, 17% of the mistakes were due to misinterpreting the information they received, making this the second most common step for failures to occur.

Comprehension can be improved by clearer instructions, labels, and training. If a person does not understand why a signal is important for them to address, it may be because they were not taught what the signal means or that it falls within their job description. Making the meaning behind different signals clear enables people to make the best possible decisions after they identify an issue.

Projection

Projection is the final element of situational awareness, referring to the application of the perceived and comprehended information into the near future. This involves considerations such as the importance of the perceived information, what actions it necessitates, and how that information may affect things in the future.

This is a more complex step than the previous two, shaped by the way the person responds to emergencies and the ways they were trained to understand the information. It is also, however, the least failed step in the study on air traffic controllers, with only 5% failing to project what would happen next.

The solution for a workplace with projection issues is much the same as it would be for comprehension, requiring procedures or directions to be rewritten or training to be restructured to better emphasize the correct response or reaction.

In Conclusion

People in the workplace don’t necessarily “not pay attention,” but they often pay attention to the wrong things. In order to know what the “right thing” to pay attention to really is, good directions and procedures must be written and accessible to the employees doing the task. In order to keep focus on the right thing, the system these employees operate within must be refined to remove distractions such as tiredness or loud noises in the work environment, or even pressures like cost cuts or rushing to save time. With TapRooT® RCA, we enable you to fix these systematic and procedural issues to create a safer workplace.

To find out what TapRooT® can do for your company, contact us for a free briefing here.

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