Hazard Identification

Strategies for seeing hazards in the workplace

Strategies And Techniques To Avoid Missing Key Visual Inputs And Reducing Risk

Most incidents that occur are not major unpredictable events, most are the result of hazards that exist right in front of us that we fail to see. They either go undetected or most of the time become part of the noise and part of the background. They become the story of “I’ve walked by that a thousand times, and I didn’t see it until the incident occurred.” Why is this the case and what tools can we learn to be able to do something about it?

We often don’t see the hazards that are right in front of us and they can become part of the background. We often regard this as poor situational awareness or inattentional blindness. Grounded in lessons from art education, tools exist that improve our ability to see and interpret the environment around us. Improving our ability to be more visually literate improves our ability to work safely and effectively.

Improving our safety performance requires proactive identification and mitigation of the hazards around us. We can’t improve what we can’t see, and visual literacy is key to our success.

Visual Literacy helps mitigate many of the common problems in Hazard Identification by:

Increasing your awareness of visual and inherent personal biases and how they influence what you see, what it means, and the actions you take.

Building critical thinking skills that allow you to better identify and mitigate risks.

Developing skills that enable you to become a more effective communicator by avoiding subjective language and saying what you see and not what you think.

Improve Employee Engagement

About 90% Of The Information That We Take In As Individuals Is Visual, So What We See Really Matters To How Effective Our Hazard Recognition Efforts Are.