The Impact of Hazard Statement Design Elements in Procedures: Counterintuitive Findings and Implications for Standards.

OBJECTIVE: The objective of these studies was to identify hazard statement (HS) design elements in procedures that affected whether both workers and lab participants performed the associated hazard mitigation. BACKGROUND: Many of the incidents in high-risk industries are the result of issues with procedures (e.g., standard operating procedures; SOPs) workers use to support their performance. HSs in these procedures are meant to communicate potential work hazards and methods of mitigating those hazards. However, there is little empirical research regarding whether current hazard design guidelines for consumer products translate to procedures. METHOD: Two experimental studies-(1) a laboratory study and (2) a high-fidelity simulation-manipulated the HS design elements present in procedures participants used while performing tasks. Participants' adherence to the mitigation of the hazard was compared for the HS designs. RESULTS: The guidelines for HSs from consumer products did not translate to procedures. Specifically, the presence of an alert icon, a box around the statement, and highlighting the statement did not improve adherence to HSs. Indeed, the only consistent finding was for the Icon, with its presence reliably predicting nonadherence in both studies. Additionally, the total number of design elements did not have a positive effect on adherence. CONCLUSION: These findings indicate that more fundamental procedure HSs research is needed to identify effective designs as well as to understand the potential attentional mechanisms associated with these findings. APPLICATION: The findings from these studies indicate that current regulations and guidelines should be revisited regarding hazard presentation in procedures.

Radio Gaga? Intra-team communication of Australian Rules Football umpires - effect of radio communication on content, structure and frequency.

Intra-team communication plays an important role in team effectiveness in various domains including sport. As such, it is a key consideration when introducing new tools within systems that utilise teams. The difference in intra-team communication of Australian Rules Football (AFL) umpiring teams was studied when umpiring with or without radio communications technology. A cross-sectional observational study was conducted to analyse the verbal communication of seven umpiring teams (20 participants) grouped according to their experience with radio communication. The results identified that radio communication technology increased the frequency and altered the structure of intra-team communication. Examination of the content of the intra-team communication identified impacts on the 'Big Five' teamwork behaviours and associated coordinating mechanisms. Analysis revealed that the communications utilised did not align with the closed-loop form of communication described in the Big Five model. Implications for teamwork models, coaching and training of AFL umpires are discussed. Practitioner Summary: Assessing the impact of technology on performance is of interest to ergonomics practitioners. The impact of radio communications on teamwork is explored in the highly dynamic domain of AFL umpiring. When given radio technology, intra-team communication increased which supported teamwork behaviours, such as backup behaviour and mutual performance monitoring.

Never blame the umpire - a review of Situation Awareness models and methods for examining the performance of officials in sport.

As sport becomes more complex, there is potential for ergonomics concepts to help enhance the performance of sports officials. The concept of Situation Awareness (SA) appears pertinent given the requirement for officials to understand what is going on in order to make decisions. Although numerous models exist, none have been applied to examine officials, and only several recent examples have been applied to sport. This paper examines SA models and methods to identify if any have applicability to officials in sport (OiS). Evaluation of the models and methods identified potential applications of individual, team and systems models of SA. The paper further demonstrates that the Distributed Situation Awareness model is suitable for studying officials in fastball sports. It is concluded that the study of SA represents a key area of multidisciplinary research for both ergonomics and sports science in the context of OiS. Practitioner Summary: Despite obvious synergies, applications of cognitive ergonomics concepts in sport are sparse. This is especially so for Officials in Sport (OiS). This article presents an evaluation of Situation Awareness models and methods, providing practitioners with guidance on which are the most suitable for OiS system design and evaluation.

Evaluation of work-as-done in information management of multidisciplinary incident management teams via Interaction Episode Analysis.

Multidisciplinary incident management teams (IMTs) are required to operate in resilient ways as emergency situations unfold unexpectedly. Although resilience in emergency management has been widely studied in many emergency contexts, the development of a new method to investigate actual resilient performance of the IMTs under realistic settings has been limited. To address such gap, this paper first introduces Interaction Episode Analysis (IEA), a novel approach to capture and describe emergent team performance. As an exploratory observation study, we apply the IEA to an information management aspect of the IMTs in two emergency exercises carried out in a high-fidelity environment. As a result, the IEA provides comparable sets of episodes as instances of work-as-done, rendering opportunities to further analyze essential elements of interactions between team members as well as information management activities. Moreover, the IEA enables comparisons between the observations and identification of challenges faced by the team in managing incident information and adaptive behaviors used to address the challenges. By gathering more evidences as well as addressing limitations identified in this study, the IEA is expected to serve as a method that facilitates the analysis of work-as-done of complex team work and the reconciliation between work-as-done and work-as-imagined to promote resilience in emergency management.