ABSTRACT
High-hazard environments pose unique challenges for operational team leaders and the team members they lead. While it may seem convenient to blame employees for lapses in attention and accidents, citing human error as the cause, in order to truly understand the causes of degraded attention and focus, and decreased situational awareness organizations must examine the nature of the operational environment and the associated hazards. These operating environments often include harsh and stress-inducing conditions, hazards, and job requirements that force employees to divide their attention as they attempt to perform their work. Ideally, if organizational resources were limitless and leaders were not constrained by economic factors, they might be able to eliminate the majority of hazards and error-inducing conditions that drain the attention of operational teams. In order to place teams in an optimal position to maintain focus on operations tasks while maintaining appropriate levels of safety, organizations should use a combined approach to mitigate hazards and error-inducing conditions.
