Complacency: The Silent Killer in Workplace Safety

The Many Faces of Complacency

Complacency is particularly tricky to deal with because the most seasoned professionals can be particularly vulnerable. How can this be? Well, the experienced worker has performed the same task countless times, right? That can easily lead them to become overconfident in their abilities, to the point of cutting corners or neglecting safety procedures. 

New hires are not invulnerable: an employee operating machinery for the first time may assume that this new equipment is like other ones they have used in the past and not take the proper care. 

In both cases, complacency allows distractions and assumptions to take over, diverting attention away from the task at hand and opening the door to preventable accidents.

The Hidden Cost of Complacency

While it’s difficult to find exact statistics that pin complacency as a leading cause of incidents, we can draw conclusions by careful sifting of peer-reviewed data and research.

In recent years, a new category of road accident has soared: distracted driving. Most often this is as a result of reading or sending phone messages while operating a vehicle. Survey results reveal human nature at its strangest in this case as 93% of Americans surveyed by the US government believe such behaviour is either very or extremely dangerous ⁽¹⁾. And yet over a quarter of these very same people have typed messages while driving themselves, while almost 2 in 5 of them had read an incoming message while driving in the month before being surveyed! 

The only possible answer to this puzzling pattern is complacency. Most drivers are experienced drivers and therefore, having mastered the skill, no longer feel the overarching need to stay focused and pay proper attention even when the journey seems routine. 

Another way of revealing complacency is to look at the statistics around what researchers in the field call the ‘close-to-home’ effect in road crashes. You might think that close to home, where we know every bend and junction like the back of our hand, would be the site of fewer, rather than more, road crashes. And yet 60% of road crashes happen within 11 kilometres of the driver’s home. 

A team of psychologists examining this phenomenon came to the conclusion that ‘behavioural effects associated with driving on familiar roads may be a factor in injury crash risk for experienced drivers….The close-to-home effect may be related to complacency when driving on familiar roads.’ ⁽²⁾

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The Stages of Complacency

So, now that we can see the data on how risky this human factor is, is there a way to break down what is actually happening so that we can combat its effects? 

There is. In his deep-dive article on this topic, renowned safety consultant Gary Higbee distinguishes two distinct stages when it comes to complacency:

In the first stage of complacency, a worker has become so competent that they no longer have to bring their full concentration to bear. A clear signal of this is their ability to complete the task while thinking about other things. 

It is in the second stage of complacency though that the errors and accidents creep in: now the mind is really wandering from the task at hand and the worker is depending on an external stimulus to refocus their attention. 

Higbee has a dramatic illustration of how human factors such as complacency (the other main ones are rushing, frustration, and fatigue) adds a ‘third dimension of risk’. 

As you can see below, the two other dimensions (Severity and Probability) can lead to higher risk (coloured in red) as they intensify. However that Human Factors dimension, as the reddening cubes powerfully show, produces most of the risk: the picture literally darkens as the human factors deepen! That means complacency or one of the other human factors is transforming a situation from being low risk to high risk – and even very high risk. 

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Gary Higbee has also produced a graph that gets at these ideas in a memorable way. In the graph below, as your eye moves from left to right, note how the blue line (task skills) rises sharply and then continuously. When you start a new job you have a steep learning curve, right? And, as you go along, that knowledge steadily increases. 

Your awareness too (starting as the green line at top-left) is at its peak on Day One! Because you are building your task knowledge from the ground up you are paying attention to every little thing. As the steep learning curve gets less intense, your attention slackens: you and your co-workers can see ‘you’ve got this’. 

But that is precisely the point at which the wise worker learns to take extra care: as the mind starts to wander, the first stage of complacency is reached; if you don’t make an effort to stop the slide, you begin to depend on some sort of external stimulus to get you back on track. Sadly that external stimulus could be a near miss! 

This is why leaders need to encourage a culture of vigilance and focus – and workers need to understand the dangers of complacency and develop practices that counter it.

The Dangers of Complacency: Real-World Examples

Remember the Costa Concordia ship sinking in Italy just over a decade ago? Unlike the Titanic, this naval disaster happened right beside the shore. The ship’s captain, Francesco Schettino, later admitted that he wasn’t using the ship’s computer-based navigation system⁽³⁾. In his own words, he was ‘was navigating by sight, because I knew those seabeds well. I had done the move three, four times.’ 

That’s complacency in a nutshell: you think you know a task so well that you can wing it. Unfortunately for the ship’s 4,000+ passengers that was not the only human factor in play: the evacuation procedures did not begin when they should have, and the captain himself literally abandoned ship as it was capsizing! 

In another news story later in the same year⁽⁴⁾, hillwalkers in Scotland had to be rescued by a military helicopter in a seriously dangerous mountain range: it later transpired that the team had not one map or compass between them and assumed their phones would guide them, sparing them the bother of thinking for themselves about what directions to follow! 

That is a kind of complacency that is quite widespread nowadays: assuming that tech will solve the problem when our heads are not in the game. 

Combating Complacency

The most effective way to address complacency is to acknowledge its presence and actively work to counter it. 

Encouraging employees to regularly ‘check-in’ with themselves (the rate-your-state tool in YOUFactors is perfect for this) and assess their mental state – whether they’re feeling rushed, frustrated, fatigued, or overconfident – can help bring awareness to the risks associated with complacency. Regular safety briefings, training refreshers, and cultivating a culture of constant vigilance can also help keep complacency at bay.

Rate your state is only one of a host of features that YOUFactors brings to bear on the complacency challenge. The platform's micro-learning courses and nudge-learning capsules both refresh and inform, memorably explaining the real and sometimes counter intuitive ways in which risk operates. The platform's error-anticipation feature allows users to get ahead of the 'in-the-moment' weaknesses that can lead to accidents by thinking through and pre-empting situations and potential risks ahead of time. Targeted close-call analysis built on decades of experience gets to the heart of the human factors in any situation while YOUFactors’ social sharing tools leverage the human side of risk and error to help each other out with real-world stories, anecdotes and insights.