Let’s think about situational awareness at work. When someone mentions personal safety, our thoughts wander off to highly hazardous situations in a high-risk working environment, or a situation where someone is performing complex tasks involving tools and maybe chemicals, and when it comes to personal security, we typically think of walking alone in the dark or in a bad area of town.

How come we don’t think about normal everyday workplace tasks or even walking around the workplace during the day?

Well because we are in a somewhat comfortable place –for the most part anyway. Often, we get into a sense of routine, and we drop our guard and tend to ignore emerging hazards we perceive as inconsequential, or even worse we don’t pay attention to our surroundings at all.

In this video we are going to have a look at a situation where a worker needs to step out of a meeting, of course, she grabs her phone and – once away from the meeting, hits up her favourite social media feed and is met with mishaps and worse.

If you want to know more about how you might take some important steps in creating, fostering, or improving your safety culture in your organization, you might want to consider checking out and enrolling in our Safety Leadership series.

More information can be found at these links:

• Safety Leadership Module I: Introduction to Health and Safety Leadership – https://continuingcaresafety.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Safety-Leadership-I-Introduction-to-Health-and-Safety-Leadership.pdf
• Safety Leadership Module II: Leading Individual Safety Performance: https://continuingcaresafety.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Safety-Leadership-2-Leading-Individual-Safety-Performance.pdf
• Safety Leadership Module III: Effective Team Leadership – https://continuingcaresafety.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Safety-Leadership-3-Effective-Team-Leadership.pdf