Complacency

Complacency is perhaps one of the biggest problems we face in completing our day to day tasks. We are “used” to things being a certain way each time and unless the obvious comes right out and hits us . . . we can be oblivious to it all. This state of mind can affect many things such as productivity, quality and safety.

See if you can read the paragraph below:
Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

You probably didn’t have much trouble reading that paragraph. It probably took you back at first, but then you were able to zip right through the text and understand the content. This is an example of how complacency works with our mind. We get used to words starting with certain letters and being a certain length and we skip right over it “thinking” we know what the word is.

In reading paragraphs it’s not a big deal . . . however when it comes to safety, complacency can lead to an incident on the job. Each moment we are working with hazardous energy, whether it be a large production machine, forklift, automobile, power tools, electricity, or even walking from one end of the facility to the other, we must keep focused on the task at hand. There is much danger in going into “autopilot” when working on the job. All too often we don’t realize how complacent we are until we have a near miss or close call.