Because the challenges you face in your day-to-day life are not likely the same as those that may arise during your employment or at your organizations. In that case, employers and employees must maintain the frame of mind most suited for the environment in which they are working. This is best achieved through adequate employee safety or situational awareness training.

There are numerous approaches to teaching situational awareness. All training aims to help people become more attuned to their environments and the many elements within them. Also, having a better grasp of the surrounding environment helps keep employees, company property, and the physical building safe.

This article discusses the need for situation awareness training in the workplace, how to impart the knowledge to the employees, and some suggestions for enhancing the program’s effectiveness.

What is Situational Awareness and Training

Situation awareness (SA) is having a firm grasp of one’s physical location and the events unfolding around it.

In terms of business or workplace, situation awareness means being aware of where people are and what they’re doing, the state of their surroundings, and any threats that may lie in wait. It helps individuals and groups stay attentive, gain relevant information, and make more prudent judgments.  

Simply said, situational awareness entails being aware of your immediate surroundings and understanding how your environment can impact your life or affect you today and in the future.

This may seem easy to do in a slow and simple context but not in a dynamic and intricate setting. Because of this, situational awareness is particularly applicable in highly volatile, unpredictable, complex, and ambiguous circumstances.

What’s more?

Situation awareness is dependent on the environment

A better understanding of situation awareness is achieved by understanding your current situation, allowing you to tell apart between yourself and your surroundings.

Separating the self (or system) from its surrounding environment is crucial in situational awareness.

That which surrounds a person, whether physical or mental, is called their environment. Understanding the environment and the factors influencing it is essential for success in any situation. The term “environmental task” refers to any activity in which individuals are expected to engage with parts of their immediate surroundings.

Here are some definitions based on various environments:

Awareness in project management: Nearly all projects have some unexpected snag. The origin of plan deviations might range from a shift in customer expectations to problems encountered during the project’s implementation phase to simple human error.

Image alt text: situational awareness training. First responder officer giving workplace situational awareness training.

Author credit: By MassDOT – First Responder Training, State Policy Academy, April 30, 2014, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70069127

The less damage done to the project’s forward momentum by unexpected events, the sooner those events are spotted, the better. If you’re a project manager, having a good grasp of the current situation will simplify your job by helping you resolve any problems before they arise.

Cognizance in work processes: The most crucial goal in operations is to improve safety, productivity, and quality to an exceptional level. To avoid mishaps, lost productivity, or interruptions in service, having a complete view is essential at every operational level from manufacturing, supply, and server administration.

A substantial amount of situational awareness allows for the prompt identification of potentially dangerous circumstances, the application of appropriate responses, and the establishment of appropriate safeguards.

What are the components of situation awareness?

SA has three main levels:

  • Perceiving the situation
  • Understanding the situation
  • Predicting future situation

Perceiving

Perceiving pertinent information is the first step in developing situational awareness. There are two significant ramifications of this. For starters, that person needs to be able to get their hands on the necessary data. The time it takes for the individual to realize they have access is measured in seconds. Hence, communicating effectively and visualization are crucial at this stage.

Understanding or comprehending

Two-tiered situational awareness emphasizes the need to grasp the current facts fully. This may require appropriate background knowledge to act on the newfound data. At this level, mental models are crucial.

This is since each piece of information is evaluated uniquely, prompting the construction of a brand-new mental model or the revision of an existing one. The faulty mental model results from omitted crucial details or incorrect information. Because of this, they have a severe emotional collapse at level 2 SA.

Predicting

This final stage of SA involves making predictions based on the data that has been accumulated and processed. This becomes especially important when incorrect assumptions are used to make projections about the future of dynamic processes.

Complex systems, for example, are marked by many interconnected parts. As a result, it isn’t easy to foresee how modifying a single variable can affect the system as a whole. Failure at level 3 SA might also result from having mental models that are inaccurate or out of date.

What Role Does Situational Awareness Play?

When leaders have a firm grasp on current affairs, they are better equipped to make sound judgments and issue effective orders to keep their organization’s employees and assets safe.

It can help with crisis management, extreme emergency navigation, event reporting for better field evaluation, and workflow design.

Here are the most common benefits of SA:

Improves Personal Safety

Learning to be more aware of your surroundings can considerably increase your safety. One way to lessen the likelihood of putting oneself in harm’s way or saving oneself from damage is to improve one’s awareness of one’s immediate surroundings.

We need to remain vigilant against workplace equipment, criminals, and thieves since they pose a real threat to our safety. This applies both in the office and in our own time. We are unable to permanently reside in bubbles of security.

Safer Working Environments

It’s up to everyone to contribute to a safer world. The government and police urge us to watch for and report anything that seems amiss. This is something we should be doing professionally to aid in detecting and reporting any suspicious conduct at our workplace or within the buildings we occupy.

And this is one of the reasons why organizations should invest in situation awareness training. By educating employees on recognizing potentially dangerous situations, businesses can reduce the likelihood of a tragedy occurring on the job.

So what’s situation awareness training?

The purpose of situational awareness training is to raise awareness of the importance of maintaining personal safety at all times, not just at home, in the classroom, or at the workplace.

The course covers topics including the Fight-or-Flight reaction and how it kicks in when your brain interprets hazardous information, how you may be better prepared to deal with dangerous situations, and how you can increase your consciousness to prevent unsafe conditions from happening.

Situation Awareness Training and How It Improves Workplace Safety

While there are a variety of preventative measures you may put in place, situational awareness training stands out since it is universally applicable in an emergency. Also, it’s critical to make sure your staff is prepared to safely escape in the event of a fire; training for such drills can only be applied in that one circumstance.

Developing generalizable abilities is more of a long-term objective than conducting exercises designed to help workers get ready for specific scenarios. SA training serves the following roles:

Improves Workplace Hazard Identification Processes

Someone with heightened situational awareness is better prepared to make prudent, protective choices in dangerous situations. To do so, they must first recognize the potential risks.

The most thorough method for doing this is through a hazard assessment, often known as a workplace risk assessment. These types of activities are typically carried out at the corporate level. Their purpose is to identify potential threats to workplace safety.

To effectively prepare for and avert emergencies, it is necessary to do more than simply recognize them; instead, you must rank them according to their likelihood and potential impact.

Even if workers can’t think of every possible danger, they should be able to pinpoint the most serious and common ones. Organizations can benefit from the knowledge and perspective of company-wide managers and team members by consulting with them about potential threats from inside and without.

Here are some workplace hazards you may identify through proper SA:

The danger of slipping, tripping, and falling: Any location, from a warehouse to a supermarket or office building, poses the risk of a slip and fall accident. Employees should always be on the lookout for and take measures to eliminate trip and fall hazards in the workplace.

Fire: Each year, fires cost businesses billions of dollars; however, many frequent causes of these fires are also easy to avoid. Knowing what’s happening around you at work might help you avoid potentially disastrous situations, such as a fire caused by defective wiring or poorly kept kitchen appliances.

Chemical exposure: Cleaning products, industrial chemicals, and other potentially harmful compounds are frequently used in many jobs. There is a risk of workplace poisoning, burns, and other forms of skin harm if workers don’t take the necessary precautions and pay attention to their surroundings.

Cyber risk: The company’s IT infrastructure is vulnerable to cyberattacks. Criminals or hackers can rapidly spread malware and ransomware over whole networks. Workplaces can avoid being breached if employees receive training to improve their cyber situational awareness.

Homicides at work: Unfortunately, active shooters and other violent threats are a reality no company can ignore. Precursors to these attacks are common, including talk of weaponry and violence. Being alert to your surroundings can help you avoid danger.

Strategies on How to Impart Employee Situation Awareness Training

There are various ways companies can deploy to deliver SA training to their employees. Some include:

One-on-One Instruction

Face-to-face instruction is among the most efficient ways to impart knowledge. If you’re a teacher or tutor, this is the most effective way to present your material to your students. The strategy also promotes the use of improvisation and first-person narrative.

Image alt text: a team of soldiers holding a situational awareness training in a one-on-one training session.

Author credit: By Staff Sgt. Mark Miranda – https://www.dvidshub.net/image/1347883, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39261695

It can be provided in entire, half-days, and sometimes in shorter and more frequent sessions. However, classes held in person have decreased since the spread of COVID. While online training is convenient, it should never precede in-person instruction.

Virtual Training

Virtual learning can fill the void when conventional means of instruction are not feasible. The advent of video conferencing tools like Zoom has made online education considerably more viable in situations where it would be unsafe to hold a face-to-face meeting or use electronic learning materials.

Another advantage of virtual training is that it can accommodate many students simultaneously without the logistical difficulties that could otherwise arise. And so it’s the best alternative for training a huge group, especially in a one-time session.

E-Learning

It can be challenging for businesses to gather all their employees in one room simultaneously. So, e-learning could be a great way to distribute many different types of courses, including situational awareness.

With the advent of e-learning, workers can complete the training whenever convenient, eliminating time limits. Complete tracking of student progress is also available, relieving pressure and burden off the institution. You may make online courses as interactive and rich in content as you like.

Guidelines for Designing an Instructional Course on Situational Awareness

When designing a program to increase personnel’s situational awareness, it’s not enough to offer an e-learning or online program and hopes for the best. Developing a keen understanding of your surroundings is a skill that can only be honed by regular repetition.

Following these guidelines will help you develop a training course that will benefit everyone on your team.

Create Anticipation or Expectations

Establishing realistic expectations is the most excellent method to guarantee any situational awareness program’s success. Before beginning any training, your staff should clearly understand what will be covered and what is expected of them. Students are more likely to participate in the activities and make progress when they fully grasp the goals.

Your executive team should understand what is required of your company during this process. The success or failure of these training initiatives hinges on the support of top management. It’s essential to provide the groundwork for continuing encouragement by outlining the training’s intended format and the benefits you want to reap from it.

Maintain or Ensure Consistency

The best results from your training will come from maintaining a regular schedule. A simple half-hour workshop won’t be enough to help your staff establish a routine of being mindful.

Therefore, include a quick SA training activity in your monthly safety briefings. Perhaps meet more frequently for lengthier training sessions every quarter. Regular practice aims to keep these abilities at the forefront of your employees’ minds and raise their general awareness. 

Be Flexible and Make Adjustments as Needed

Training in risk awareness should be tailored to the specific needs of each organization, just as with any other type of health and safety education. Although most pre-built training sessions and exercises are made to be universally applicable, feel free to tweak them to suit your organization better. It would help if you had your workforce to be prepared to identify potential hazards and take corrective action.

Also, training activities benefit greatly from including real-world scenarios your company has experienced. Choose occurrences from your past that included warning indicators, however obvious or subtle they may have been, and use them as instructional examples. Tabletop exercise templates can be modified to help your team practice navigating and solving real-world problems.

Last but not least, make an effort to modify your training to meet the needs of your staff. Some of your team may be located in different cities and unable to participate in regular in-person activities.

Or perhaps some of your staff members are more in need of coaching than others. Suppose you want your employees to all be on the same page. In that case, it’s essential to use or create software that can accommodate their varying levels of expertise and access.

Handle one thing at a time

Science has shown that the vast majority of people are unable to multitask effectively. We are not multitasking machines, after all. When it comes to making decisions and keeping tabs on what’s happening around you at work, multitasking can have disastrous results.  

Avoid or Limit Distractions

Distractions, like multitasking, might reduce one’s awareness of the surrounding environment. Anything that takes a worker’s attention from their actions is considered a distraction. Examples of such distractions are excessive noise, bright lights, other people in the workplace, etc.

In addition to causing a drop in output, distractions also make workers less situationally aware by forcing them to “tune out” their surroundings to function. The best way to find out if your staff is routinely distracted is to ask them, and if they are, commit to reducing such distractions whenever possible.

Permit adequate downtime

The Mayo Clinic recommends at least seven hours of sleep for people every night. Insufficient sleep impairs an individual’s ability to think clearly and take appropriate safety precautions. If this problem persists, the worker may develop a sleep deficit.

Although you can’t control when your employees sleep, make sure that their jobs aren’t getting in the way of getting enough shut-eye. In addition, you can encourage short breaks for both physical and mental rejuvenation at set intervals during the workday.

Conclusion

There are numerous advantages to elevating employees’ situational awareness and boosting their sense of security, fostering a more vigilant company culture, and broadening their horizons regarding what they can take in.

Heightened situational awareness is helpful in any setting, whether you run a high-risk cash business or spend your days in an office. Therefore, no organization should undervalue the need for employee situation awareness training.