DESIGNING HR INTERVENTIONS TO ENHANCE COGNITIVE READINESS AND SITUATIONAL AWARENESS IN CRISIS ENGINEERING

Abstract

Crisis engineering involves quickly making decisions that have high-stakes consequences, with uncertainty, pressure, and cognitive overload thrown in the mix. This exacting scenario is where crisis engineers struggle in the presence of technical training and emergency plans, and even more troubling, is that there is little to no effort made with HR systems to prepare people psychologically. HR systems remain option-developing mechanisms that mostly ignore the mindset and behaviours of the possible strategies to perform well when faced with crisis events. What this paper offers is a conceptual paradigm to support HR and management design of psychologically and situationally based interventions that increase cognitive readiness and situational awareness (the foundations of crisis performance). This study does not empirically or statistically employ a study or research methodology. Instead, the study brings together concepts of cognitive psychology, human factors science, and HR development (HRD) into a three-tiered intervention framework to examine how stress inoculation training, gamification, and cognitively based scenario-training tools can prepare engineering practitioners to perceive, act, and focus under future crisis conditions. The study shows the need to change the perception of HR from a transactional cost to a suitable strategic mechanism of psychological resilience. By embedding cognitive readiness in the design of HR systems, the organizational capacity to respond to a crisis can be improved, generating safety improvements and a healthy workforce that performs in extreme conditions. This paper represents a new direction for developing a crisis and crisis-performance-oriented workforce.