Complacency is defined by the dictionary as "a feeling of self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by a lack of awareness of actual pending trouble, deficiencies or controversy."

Psychologists believe that complacency might result from what is known as "confirmation bias," which is the tendency to look for, or interpret information in a way that conforms with one’s beliefs. This phenomenon may be reflected in how a person evaluates their own actions or how others evaluate those same actions. 

This is especially common with people who deviate from accepted good practice, take risks, or shortcuts, to accomplish goals or objectives without experiencing any appreciable negative consequences. These people are lulled into risk-taking, believing that an adverse event just “won’t happen to them.” Alternately a supervisor may attribute fault (complacency) to a worker for a failure, regardless of the actual reason or cause. 

Complacency is commonly attributed to some shortcoming on a worker’s part, such as he was not paying attention and as a result got injured, didn’t focus on the task at hand, was rushing, forgot to use common sense, got frustrated, etc. All of these are mentioned from time to time as the reason for the worker getting injured. This unfortunately triggers traditional interventions such as training, catching the worker exhibiting these behaviors during inspections, and trying to correct it by providing feedback, coaching, counseling, or ultimately using rewards or disciplinary action. This is sometime perceived as the “main” thrust of the safety manager’s job — “keeping the good people safe.”      

This is highly detrimental to an organization’s operations and ultimately its success. Research has found that complacency was mostly caused by bad organizational or operational practices, deficient procedures, misaligned goals, unintegrated systems as well as a poor work environment within an organization. Another key contributing factor is the relationship of the supervisor with their direst reports. This is easily correctable by management action or intervention.     

Complacency-Driven Risk

The culture of complacency can affect any organization, worksite, department work group or individual where the primary focus is on meeting production goals or cutting costs, as well as accepting or ignoring standards creep. In such a culture, speed is valued and cost-cutting rewarded, while ignoring potential consequences. In many cases, there is a continual pressure for greater speed and ever-increasing production output, without due consideration for capacity, capability or consequence (standards creep). This, in many cases. results in the workers taking shortcuts or risks to achieve goals and/or meet expectations in order to keep their jobs. 

This culture of complacency develops over time with each risk taken without an adverse effect resulting in the acceptance of even more risk, which results in standards creep. This leads to the normalization of deviance. See my paper on “Normalization of Deviations” - posted here. All this reinforces the fact that all levels of management in the organizations must be on the “lookout” for standards creep, where production trumps protection and a culture of complacency as well as risk taking becomes the norm.

The Signs of Complacency

There are many underlying reasons for employee complacency which managers and supervisors should be looking for to try and control its inevitable adverse effect. One sure sign of complacency is when employees stop being actively engaged in their work, stop solving problems, work cooperatively in moving the project’s goals forward, work hard at their tasks, or when they lose their passion and do just enough to get by. As a result, they become unproductive, and their attitude invariably affects the whole crew. This results in the employees’ failure to add value to the operations and ultimately negatively impacting the organization’s performance.

Employee disengagement can also stop them from being thorough, detail oriented and over time they become lazy. Their action becomes disruptive to the work culture and a liability to operations. Workers lose their incentive to further their careers and organizational goals. Some of this may be the result of work that is repetitive and unchallenging. Some of this may be attributed to the fact that the employees do not see any potential for growth or promotion. Rightly or wrongly, employees may perceive that playing it safe is in their best interest rather than being an active team member. These are strong warning signs that they are physically present but mentally absent in their work.

Cognition

Due to complacency, there may be some physical tasks that may require attention in order to avoid defective outcomes or the employee getting injured. Management may post signs or tell workers to pay attention, so as to deal with the potential problem. What these folks ignore is that it is virtually impossible for a human to work 8 or 10 hours fully and totally concentrating on the task at hand. 

Typically, the mind can concentrate for maybe up to about 20 minutes before it invariably phases out for a few minutes. The length of the consternation period also depends on a host of different factors such as the task being intrinsically motivating, enjoyable, or challenging. As opposed to the task’s complexity, difficulty, or repetition. The task environment being uncomfortable, distracting, noisy, or the individual feeling stressed, hunger, tired, or the person’s emotional state, to name a few.

Humans are influenced in their cognition by several conflicting emotional and motivational factors. Cognitive processes include perception, recognition, imagination, remembering, thinking, judging, reasoning, problem solving, conceptualizing, and planning. These cognitive processes can emerge in human language, thought, imagery, and symbols. As an example, humans cannot totally “shut out” or ignore people speaking to them or around them. 

Activation in the brain starts up automatically and processes the information.   A research study found that drivers who were told to ignore any talking by others while driving found that they couldn’t ignore the speaking because the processing of spoken language is so automatic that you can’t turn it off. You can’t will yourself not to understand a speaker, it just gets processed automatically. This secondary processing may dramatically reduce the attention given to driving.

After an accident or some negative outcome is studied, complacency may be listed as a contributing factor. Complacency is a state of mind and could very well be a contributing factor, but generally the selected interventions to impact and change this invariably fall short of effectively dealing with it. And the focus on getting people to “think” before doing something usually will not work as planned. One thing to remember is that behaviors that are habitual are generally not subject to complacency, and do not need any special attention to be paid to them. An example of this would be putting on seat belts in cars. This is generally done automatically because it is a habit, and people generally do not need any special conscious triggers to “make it happen”. So, one possible approach may be working on making safe work a habitual endeavor. But some risks associated with changed conditions may interfere with this.

Conclusion

Complacency is in fact a risk, and there are only a few methods in dealing with risk. These are risk avoidance, acceptance and monitoring, transfer, reducing the impact, its likelihood or negative outcome. The first few mentioned are either impractical or ineffective. The ones that may garner some forms of positive result are reducing the impact or better yet reducing the likelihood of those risks occurring. One organizational approach is to make risk assessment a structured integrated part of planning. In construction, risk should be identified and assessed every time a contractor considers taking on a construction project.

It should be considered during the estimating process, the operational planning process, the means and methods selection process, the pricing process, the subcontractor selection process, the staff assignment process, the organizational structure, selected work processes, tools and techniques used, technology selection, control methods, goal and objective setting, workforce capability, skill, experience and motivation; to name a few.

To combat complacency and build enthusiasm, management must improve the work climate to motivate employees. Recognizing and rewarding employees for good work or making the work more challenging and rewarding are two ways to improve their job satisfaction. Management and supervision must treat the workers fairly and equitably. They should enable the workers to succeed by doing proper planning, coordinating, expediting, staffing, directing and controlling. They should also try to make the work meaningful so that employees feel they are learning, improving, as well as see opportunities for growth and advancement in the organization.

Issues stemming from complacency will decrease if an organization creates a culture that embraces enterprise-wide risk management. Functionally, such an organization is structured to be more responsive to risks and their treatments if dealing with risk is a part of all planning, organizing, directing, staffing, and controlling as it regards every aspect of the project delivery process, and has some form of confirmation element that it is being carefully adhered to as well as managed.