The Invisible Epidemic
Situational awareness among workers is critical to maintaining safety at pits and quarries, and it all starts with a good night’s sleep.
Insufficient sleep among the workforce has reached epidemic proportions. In 2008, the U.S. National Sleep Foundation found that adults were getting an average of six hours and 40 minutes of sleep nightly during the workweek, well below the seven to nine hours of quality sleep that is the scientifically recognized minimum people need to function at their best.
Twenty minutes’ lost sleep may not seem like a lot, but the effect is cumulative. And because it’s an average, a lot of people are doing worse than that. Some substantially worse: another study found that in 1942, less than eight per cent of the population was getting by on less than six hours’ sleep a night; in 2017 that figure was nearly 50 per cent. To quote Matthew Walker, director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley, what we have is a “catastrophic sleep-loss epidemic.”
By undermining workplace situational awareness (SA), fatigue essentially adds to an individual’s cognitive workload on the job – not by adding new stimuli and stressors, but by impairing the ability to perceive and respond to the already-existing ‘normal’ ones. Fatigue reduces awareness, diminishes risk aversion and transforms dangers that would usually be minor, easily identified and avoided into serious and often life-endangering threats.
“There’s a very close correlation between sleep deprivation and blood alcohol concentration equivalents,” says Mitch Cowart, a safety technology expert with Caterpillar Inc. He points to a 2000 study that found that subjects deprived of sleep for 17 to 19 hours performed on some tests at the same level as people with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.05 per cent, with seriously degraded response times and accuracy measures.
WHAT IS SITUATIONAL AWARENESS?
Officially, situational awareness is defined as: “the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning and the projection of their status in the near future.”
In layman’s terms, however, it can be defined as simply just knowing and being cognizant of what is going on around you. Some think of it as having a ‘helicopter view’, i.e., having a good overall picture of one’s
environment.
However it is defined, it is required in order to function optimally and to operate equipment safety, and everything from lack of sleep to excessive fatigue and overwork will impact it in a negative way.
Today, the term is gaining ground as a critical part of ensuring health and safety in the workplace.
Given some of the inherent dangers of working at a pit or quarry – heavy machinery to name just one – degraded response times can pose serious dangers for workers. Recognizing the importance of situational awareness and striving to instill a safety culture that takes this into consideration, is critical for the aggregate industry.
“Around the world, 7,500 people lose their lives due to their occupation every day,” says Zachary Kiehl, CEO and co-founder of Sentinel Occupational Safety Inc. While Kiehl says there are a lot of factors involved, “there are still hundreds if not thousands of deaths every day focused on lack of situational awareness.”
The human cost should always be the prime focus of efforts to improve cognitive function and workplace situational awareness, but the financial cost is staggering too. As Kiehl notes, “the International Labour Organization has estimated that four per cent of the world’s entire annual GDP, about $3 trillion, is lost to direct and indirect costs of occupational accidents and diseases.”
Cowart had the opportunity to work with a mining company in Mexico where a haul truck driver collided with a van carrying mine employees. Seven people lost their lives. Cowart correctly targeted fatigue as the cause, but the problem still took a while to unravel. “I wondered if the workers had a long commute, but it turned out they lived 20 minutes away. I asked how long the shifts were – eight hours, which is actually four hours shorter than most mines. So I was puzzled… until I found out most of the employees were also farmers. The mine was their second job.”
Jonathan Fava, president of Scan-Link Technologies Inc., believes work pressures are a big factor. “On the sites where we work it’s more about ‘we’ve got to get the job done.’ To speed things up, corners are cut. We work a lot in construction. Companies will put barriers around the swing radius of excavators. But say an excavator has to move five feet away, just for a few minutes. The correct procedure is that you have to move that barrier too. But the operator thinks ‘I’m only going to be there five minutes and then I come back.’ It’s that time constraint that makes people take shortcuts. It’s not intentional. It’s hustle, it’s trying to get the job done.”
Fava also makes the observation that there are close calls on the job all the time, but they tend not to get reported. “The operator and groundworker aren’t going to go and report it. It’s more like, ‘Whew, no one was hurt. Let’s move on,’” he says.
BUILT-IN PROTECTION
As Cowart explains, probably the key to maintaining optimal cognitive performance in the workplace is to let one of the body’s own systems do its work: the glymphatic system. You read that correctly: the glymphatic system is less well known than the lymphatic system, which helps clear waste products and cellular debris from the body. The glymphatic system performs the same function, but solely for the brain.
“The glymphatic system filters out the toxins that build up in our brain from contaminants in the air, chemicals we get exposed to, what we eat and drink,” Cowart says. “Even when we exercise, our body will produce waste that can build up in our brains.” The catch is that the glymphatic system only switches on when a person is in the deepest stages of sleep. Any shortage of sleep will reduce the number of toxins it can remove from the brain. A buildup results. “You become literally intoxicated,” Cowart says.
While fatigue and a few other factors impair cognitive functioning by undermining the ability to perceive and respond to stimuli and stresses, others impair performance by piling on the cognitive workload. The list includes personal conflicts at home or at work, illness, equipment problems, deadline pressures, ‘multitasking’ and generally heavy workload, as well as deficient training and inexperience.
The Yerkes-Dodson Model was developed by two psychologists in 1908 to correlate stress and performance. They found that while a certain amount of positive stress can enhance performance, outside that positive zone – in either direction – performance starts to be eroded.
“On one hand you have people doing boring, monotonous tasks that don’t have enough of that positive stress, and they can become complacent and have a lapse in situational awareness,” Kiehl says. “On the other end of the bell curve are individuals who are on the edge of burnout – they’re doing too much, the stress is too high, and they develop tunnel vision, which is a real physiological phenomenon.”
Harvard Medical School found that insomnia costs the average worker in the U.S. 11 days of productivity a year – for a yearly total of $63 billion. And the American Society of Safety Engineers says that every dollar spent on accident prevention generates a benefit of three to six dollars in loss avoidance.
The problem, of course, is that the benefit is hidden. More work needs to be done to build a direct link between actual workplace accidents and the role that deficient situational awareness plays in causing them.
“Everybody agrees that there’s a problem, but there’s a lack of ability to acquire the data to quantify how large it is and then fix it,” Kiehl says. “As of now, a lot of the organizations you’re seeing are the early adopters – they’re acting more from initial hypotheses than hard numbers. Technology solutions, especially sensor-based technologies, can really help provide the data to quantify if employers can also handle the safety culture issues.”
With the corporate culture side in mind, Cowart has developed a list of five questions he poses to clients and audiences at trade events:
1. Do you or your organization have a process to manage your Journey to Zero (incidents)?
2. How are cultural stigmas frustrating your Journey to Zero?
3. Are employees getting sufficient quality and quantity of sleep?
4. Do employees have sufficient opportunities to get sleep?
5. What controls do you have in place to protect those workers who are most exposed to risk?
While Caterpillar, Sentinel and Scan-Link all provide technology solutions that help to reduce the risk of lapses in workplace situational awareness, it’s notable that technology is part of the answer to only one question – Number 5.
“Having the technology is good, but you need to know what the root cause of lapses in SA (situational awareness) is,” says Fava. “You need that data. We’re moving in that direction with a lot of our clients because it’s not just about knowing you’ve had so many near misses. Now we want to know why we had those near misses. You can make positive changes – if you have the data.”