Transition to Plain Language Overhead Emergency Announcements: An Experiential Account

Significant findings were the wide variance of color codes used to signify various events across facilities and challenges faced when considering change to long-established practice. This work demonstrates the strength of collaboration with experts across disciplines to generate workable solutions to meet requirements and improve safety. The gap in this work was length of time to overcome mindsets that color codes were the only solution and time intervals required to obtain approvals. Overall impact of the work is enterprise adoption of standard plain language emergency alerts so personnel, regardless of the facility or location, will recognize and respond to respective threats. Areas for future study include retrospective project evaluation and feedback from external partners about effects and impacts.