Being comfortable at work sounds like a condition anyone would want to aspire to.
In a way it should be, comfortableness can be found at the intersection of a positive work environment and confidence in your ability to work.
In another way, becoming too comfortable with the tasks you do, especially safety sensitive ones, can lead to complacency setting in. Complacency doesn't sound too harmful of a condition, but it can lead to devastating consequences.
Complacency is a mindset where you become comfortable with the situation or task at hand, and as a result, your vigilance for looking for potential hazards dwindles. Think of it as going on autopilot, you've done it so many times, you don't devote a whole lot of bandwidth to it like when you first started doing it. Or you may have done something so many times that over time your focus has turned to doing it more efficiently or quicker, and maybe not necessarily safer.
Sometimes, something you have gotten away with 100 times may turn around and bite you the 101st time.
Complacency can reveal itself at the organization level as well.
As a leader, you must be careful about inadvertently taking your foot off the gas when things are going well for your organization, especially in Safety. Or being overly confident in what has worked in the past will continue to work to the same degree going forward.
The people, the work, the regulations, and the hazards change over time; what we push to our teams must evolve to continue supporting that change. Complacency allows us to fall below the level of our training when we don't continually push the risks of not continuously putting the training in action.
Elevating an organization's safety culture is not just about explaining the how, but pushing the why, day-in and day-out.
If you ask a group of people to describe three points of contact, most will know it, but would most practice it 100% of the time? Those that don’t haven’t forgotten how to use 3 points but have lost an appreciation for what could happen if they don’t. For someone who fails to tie off when working at heights unguarded, generally the knowledge of how and when to wear the harness is there, but a false sense of security grows in the comfortableness that comes with successfully performing the work without fall protection time in and time out.
But it only takes one time for things to go very wrong.
This is where the team that surrounds you at work comes into play. This is where everyone is a stakeholder. Everyone at any level should feel empowered to bring a concern up to anyone at any level.
It’s important to remember that even routine tasks carry the potential for incident or injury, because that reminder may be the only thing standing between complacency and a preventable incident.
