Fatigue: The Silent Epidemic

A study published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that nearly 40 percent of U.S. workers experience fatigue. Why should employers care? Worker fatigue can lead to lost productivity. Total lost productive time averaged 5.6 hours per week for workers with fatigue, compared to 3.3 hours for their counterparts without fatigue. Even when they were working, workers with fatigue symptoms had much lower rates of productivity than their sprightly counterparts —mainly due to low concentration and increased time needed to accomplish tasks. 

Just as importantly, fatigue can lead to accidents. According to Clockwork Consultants, a UK-based company that helps enterprises manage fatigue risk, fatigued employees are also three times more likely to have an accident at work. How Fatigue Affects Safety Why are fatigued employees more likely to be involved in accidents? An article in the New York Times described the longest sleep-restriction study, conducted by researchers at the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the Hospital at University of Pennsylvania. Researchers measured subjects’ response to sleeplessness while performing a psychomotor vigilance task, or PVT. This repetitive task (pressing a space bar when a flash of numbers appears on a computer screen) measures subjects’ attentiveness and allows researchers to accurately measure their response to different levels of sleep deprivation. 

The study found that subjects who had eight hours of sleep nightly over the 14-day study performed well, with hardly any attention lapses or cognitive declines. In subjects who had four or six hours of sleep nightly, performance declined steadily over the course of the study. Members of both groups did steadily worse on memory tests as the study progressed, and a significant number of even those who had gotten six hours of sleep nightly were falling asleep on task. 

The moral? Individuals vary in their tolerance to sleeplessness, but workers who are consistently getting less than eight hours of sound sleep per night could be working at less than peak attention and more accident-prone. 

Fighting the Fatigue Factor 

Workplace policies can drastically reduce the incidence and cost of employee fatigue risk. You can’t control what employees do off-hours, but you can control the hours they work. Many safety-critical occupations have strict rules about how long a worker can stay on the job and how long breaks must be. Productivity experts recommend similar guidelines for most jobs. If extended hours/overtime are common, managers should calculate the time required for the commute home, meal preparation, eating and socializing with family when calculating employees’ work shifts. Workplaces may also provide on-site accommodations, prepared meals for workers and facilities where employees can take a nap when they are tired. 

Proper working conditions can also reduce the risk of fatigue. Fatigue is increased by dim lighting or other limited visual conditions (e.g., due to weather), high temperatures, high noise, high comfort, tasks that must be sustained for long periods of time, and monotonous work tasks. Eliminating such conditions and providing environments that have good lighting, comfortable temperatures and reasonable noise levels quickly pay for themselves in reduced risk, according to a study by the Canadian Centre of Occupational Health and Safety (COHS). 

If possible, work tasks should also provide a variety of interest and tasks should change throughout the shift, the COHS recommends. 

Organizations should adopt a variety of methods to make themselves “fatigue safe.”

The most common include:

* Special training to help workers understand their personal levels of fatigue 

* Development of “fatigue safe” work schedules, including compliance with any applicable regulations

* Development of fatigue risk management policies and procedures

* Use of fatigue models to investigate fatigue-related accidents

* Committees to oversee fatigue management programs. 

For more suggestions on reducing fatigue in the workplace, please call us.