Electrical construction workers need to be aware of their surroundings and potential hazards. Paying attention to what’s going on around them could help prevent accidents and incidents.

Situational awareness is the ability to perceive, assess and respond effectively to a situation. It is a critical skill for construction and electrical workers. Individuals need to collect information from their surroundings, understand what it means and use it to determine the optimal course of action.

Growing your skills

Situational awareness is a skill that can be constantly improved. It is the crux of good decision-making. In an effort to get better at it, workers can take 360-degree inventory of their surroundings to see everything that’s happening around them. They should also consider what bystanders and co-workers are seeing. By questioning everything, workers can develop the proper intelligence to make the best and safest decisions.

OSHA’s Situational Awareness Outline indicates that workers should “know how to identify different safety hazards within the worksite, and what could create a hazard in the future.” 

Predicting what comes next is helpful in preventing an accident. As a result, workers should have the question of what could happen next programmed in their minds.

The subconscious plays a role in situational awareness, too. The more a worker does a particular job, the more familiar they are with their environment and the hazards that exist, or that they may potentially encounter. However, familiarity can lead to complacency, which can result in an accident, injury or worse. For more information, check out “The Art of Safety” in the February 2022 edition of SAFETY LEADER.

A biased point of view can also lead to poor decision making and an unsafe workplace. In addition to the subconscious, stress levels and mental health can affect judgment and the decision-making process. Workers and employers should try to stay level-headed and focus on their responsibilities and surroundings.

Two-way communication

The best situational awareness or safety protocols only work if the information can be communicated effectively. Safety requires workers and employers to work as a team and transmit information as it pertains to risk, hazard mitigation, efficiency and overall compliance. 

An example from the worker perspective may include alerting a supervisor to a hazard or indicating to them that a task may be too risky to be completed by one person. From the employer’s point of view, it may include prejob safety briefings, education and training.

Employees are entitled to a safe and healthy work environment. Employers are required to provide information and training about hazards, methods to prevent harm and the OSHA standards that apply to their scope of work. Workers also have the right to file a complaint with OSHA or request hazard correction from employers, and they can file a confidential complaint with OSHA to have their workplace inspected.

Any worker who submits a complaint or cooperates with an investigation is protected from retaliatory action under OSHA’s whistleblower protection program. However, organizations with a positive and healthy safety culture should have no problem having open dialogue with workers on issues of hazard and risk.

Employers may also provide training on situational awareness itself. Educating workers on how to identify and navigate job-specific hazards is crucial. Teaching them how to think quickly on their feet in a fast-paced environment can prove extraordinarily valuable. All education and training should be provided in a language that every worker understands.

Finally, according to OSHA, as it pertains to situational awareness, “As soon as you can identify a hazard in the workplace you should do everything possible to fix the hazard, communicate the hazard to others, eliminate the hazard altogether. If you are unable to fix it: get someone who can and protect workers until it is corrected.”

For employers, “When changes occur within the workplace, let others know [the] hazards that might be present, monitor the performance of everyone on site, give safety information to anyone who is on site, identify potential or existing problems (i.e., equipment-related or operational), demonstrate awareness (know what process[es] are happening), explain what should be done to eliminate the hazards, and eliminate hazards and protect workers.”

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