How Can We Apply Mindfulness to Safety?    Wombat Software wants to explore this question

Mindfulness is the practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one’s thoughts, emotions or experiences on a moment-to-moment basis and “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, to the present moment.

A focus on present time tunes the mind to what it is experiencing and doing.  As a result, internal and external distractions lose their power.

Studies show that employing mindfulness training in the workplace has applications in improving task reliability and in promoting the contemplation of immediate dangers.

 Would this focus be especially useful in workplaces that are dynamic and demand acute attention to detail?   Furthermore, would it prevent errors and incidents?

How can we apply mindfulness to a Safety Management Program?

• Firstly,  people focus on what they are doing in the current moment, they are more a-tuned to changing tasks and demands. Mindfulness promotes cognitive engagement because you are present in the current moment.
• Secondly,  the practice of mindfulness helps workers adapt in real time to changing situations. Incidents often arise when changes in processes and systems.
• Part of achieving mindful adaptivity is embracing employees who report incidents that impact safety. You are reinforcing proactive worker engagement to bring about improvement
• Finally, paying attention to the present moment makes it hard to go through routine tasks in a detached robotic way.

Can smartphone apps be a way to promote the adaption of time-intensive mindfulness training programs to line workers Apps have the advantages of portability and accessibility.  They can be adapted to integrate key components of mindfulness with task-specific objectives and situations.

We want to hear your ideas on integrating safety mindfulness into the mobile app that we are designing.