Pro Tip: Following these six steps will enable your operations staff to sharpen their observational skills.

When you're observant with purpose, you use your senses to examine something that you're curious about, and you evaluate what you see, hear, feel, smell and even taste.

Observing with purpose is not the same as "seeing." Seeing is passive. For example, you look at your cellphone dozens of times each day, but you’d struggle to replicate the home screen without looking.

Observation, however, is a process of paying attention, intently and actively, so that you can gather specific information to draw a conclusion.

Training your brain to observe allows you to learn and remember more about the people, places, events and situations around you — to pick up on details you might otherwise miss. Critically assessing your observations helps you to understand, to reach well-informed conclusions and to note issues more effectively.

In turn, these abilities strengthen your workplace and interpersonal skills, improving the way you interact with the people and environments around you.

Here are six Pro Tips for becoming a better observer:

1. Know Your Subject: Get to know the process, the machine and how it should sound or operate.

2. Slow Down and Look Above-Below-Around-Behind: Take the time to study everything and look for small details that appear abnormal.

3. Listen With All Your Senses: There’s more than just looking. Listen, feel, smell and maybe even taste to help draw better conclusions.

4. Be Curious: Really take the time to find things that others have missed. Be a professional observer.

5. Look for Patterns as well as Irregular Patterns: Quite often a machine will develop irregular patterns that you can hear, feel or see.

6. Ask Questions or Report “See Something, Say Something:” Don’t be afraid to speak up or call maintenance to report your suspicions.

There are areas that we walk past every day in the workplace that are unsafe, unsanitary, out of adjustment, loose, worn out or broken. The equipment speaks to you, if you’re a good listener.

Is there a way we could become more aware of our surroundings by simply becoming more critically observant?

What would you do if I asked you to study your cellphone home screen, knowing I’d ask you to try and draw it and all the apps?

From an observation standpoint, you would probably do the following: Concentrate; focus with purpose; use all your senses; be on a mission, and work to gain knowledge.

We can use these same skills in our workplace. The operations team could be more helpful to the maintenance department by expanding the size of the team doing inspections. No one should know the nuances of a machine better than the operator.

Maintenance could probably address a problem noted and reported. The more eyes looking, the better the odds of finding opportunities to prevent an injury, a recall, waste and/or unplanned downtime.

The next time you walk the floor, pay particular attention to process and people. Scan from ceiling to floor and from side to side. Look above the asset, at the asset, around the asset and below asset. Observe the process from multiple angles and concentrate intently. Notice things that are loose, noisy, irregular in motion or sound. Look for exposed wiring, ineffective guards or points of entanglement like shafts that extend out more than half their diameter or that do not present a smooth edge.

In the end, set a GOAL — Get Out and Look — and when you “See Something, Say Something.”

Rowdy Brixey is founder and president of Brixey Engineering Inc.

You can connect with him on LinkedIn.