What is situational awareness?
Situational awareness is being aware of what is happening around you in terms of where you are, where you are supposed to be, and whether anyone or anything around you is a threat to your health and safety. Our knowledge, experience and education enables us to understand what is going on around us and helps us to determine if it is safe. This means that everyone’s situational awareness is individual and potentially different. We use our situational awareness to make decisions and instruct others.
Our situational awareness is only as accurate as our own perception or reading of the situation, so what we think is happening may not accurately reflect reality. How we read a situation can be influenced by many things such as the type of information we have been given, our own experience and distractions in the workplace.
Why should you improve it?
It is important that you know how many problems you face and how serious they are. The temporary loss or lack of situational awareness is a causal factor in many construction accidents. Often there is so much ‘going on’ in your working environment, or you become so absorbed in your own thoughts, that you fail to spot those things that could pose a serious threat to your health and safety.
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