A disruptive approach to non-technical skills and situational awareness competencies
- Autores: Juan Carlos López, Khaled Shehabeldeen, Alvaro Villalobos, Andres Alvarado, Carlos Botero, G. Miranda
- Localización: ORPjournal, ISSN-e 2385-3832, Nº. Extra 1, 2023 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Proceedings XXIII International Congress on Occupational Risk Prevention), pág. 35
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
Objectives: Research has shown that non-technical skills – or lack of them – contribute to most personal and process safety incidents in high-risk industries. Situational awareness in the most influential non-technical skill. Authors developed a disruptive program to generate situational awareness competencies and improve non- technical skills of front-line employees. The process is called Permanent Attention.
The program combines best practices adapted from high-risk industries and industrial psychology science to generate statistically significant improvements in situational awareness competencies through a sustainable and cost-effective approach.
The paper shows real case applications from different organizations where the Permanent Attention program has generated significant improvement in the participants’ situational awareness competency acquisition and retention.
Methods: Authors developed the Permanent Attention Program, to help organizations improve employees’ levels of situational awareness competencies and improve their non-technical skills, also called Crew Resource Management (CRM) skills. The Solution is designed to generate statistically significant improvements in situational awareness competencies, impacting positively all other CRM skills.
The Permanent Attention program is executed with the learner at the centre of the competency acquisition and retention process. The Situation Awareness Global Assessment Technique (SAGAT) is used to measure the levels of situational awareness competency before and after the training, to determine the impact achieved through the program. Statistic models are used to scientifically demonstrate the significant impact of the process in the three elements of situational awareness: Attention, Comprehension and Anticipation.
The training sessions in-between SAGATs contain capsules of information that equip the participant(s) with fundamentals and exercises. This is a practical toolkit for exercising each element of the situational awareness – Attention, Comprehension and Anticipation – as a separate skill.
To complement the practice of non-technical skills, employees are exposed to simulations of critical operational situations, so they can demonstrate their leadership, communications, teamwork, decision-making skills in group and learn how to manage stress in such situations.
The levels of situational awareness competencies are periodically monitored using the SAGAT after the training to ensure a sustained improvement in the participants’ competencies.
The feedback provided immediately after each SAGAT is key to let the participant focus on the element(s) of situational awareness that require improvement. Once the feedback is received, the participant is requested to self-evaluate the level on each element of situational awareness.
This reinforces self-consciousness and encourages a sense of commitment to improve by conviction, not by imposition. Statistical significance is measured before and after the training sessions.
Results: Permanent Attention is being successfully used in organizations with a wide range of maturity. Case- studies will be presented on individual and group measurements of situational awareness levels of competency, before and after participation in the Permanent Attention program. The statistically significant improvements brought by the solution are reflected in the results that will be presented in the paper.
