How is Industry Mitigating Fatigue-Related Hazards?
Mike is interviewed in this article that appeared in the Baton Rouge Business Report. Author: Sam Barnes.
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7 Strategies for Managing Employee Fatigue
This article was published by WSPS (Workplace Safety & Prevention Services). Link to their website here.
Sleep-related fatigue has reached epidemic proportions in Canada, says Mike Harnett, President of Solaris Fatigue Management.* “Three quarters of the population are not getting the minimum required amount of sleep. Employees are showing up for work cognitively or physically unable to do the job to the extent that you expect.”
This may translate directly into injuries and incidents. “The reality is that what gets labelled human error is often a consequence of fatigue,” says Mike. “If you’ve been awake for 17 hours straight, you have an impairment equivalent to .05% blood alcohol content. If you’re awake for 20 hours, you’re at .08%.”
While we may not be able to eliminate fatigue, implementing a fatigue management system or plan can help reduce the related risks. Mike offers seven strategies for managing employee fatigue.
- Educate senior leadership and managers on the cost and consequences of employee fatigue and build a strong business case. Management may not have considered that office workers face fewer fatigue-related hazards than someone on the factory floor, and may not correlate fatigue with organizational performance and employee safety. Here’s a key statistic for your business case: research shows 13% of workplace injuries can be attributed to fatigue.** Work with senior leaders to establish targets and metrics for managing fatigue.
- Determine whether your workplace has a fatigue problem by conducting an employee survey. If your workplace has a culture in which employees may not feel comfortable talking about their experience with fatigue, invite them to respond anonymously.
If you determine fatigue is a concern, consider the following steps.
- Review your safety management systems through a fatigue lens and start incorporating fatigue into your workplace’s health and safety policies and procedures. For instance, set out rules and responsibilities for supervisors for managing someone who is tired. Are they allowed to let an employee have a nap? Do they have the authority and means to temporarily assign the employee to a task posing less risk? What is the process when someone consistently shows up fatigue impaired?
- Review your hazard assessments through the same lens. Start with high-risk tasks. How much risk could fatigue add and how could you mitigate it?
- Consider the work schedule from a hazard or fatigue perspective, especially if your workplace has shift assignments. “For example,” says Mike, “early morning activities (before 6 a.m.) are high risk because these workers are at ‘the window of circadian low’ — the worst possible time cognitively and physically for us to be functioning because it’s when our bodies are programmed for optimal sleep.” Implement strategies to offset or mitigate the risks, such as moving critical tasks away from the hours between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m., or double-checking any work performed at that time.
- Screen employees for sleep disorders and incorporate solutions into wellness and benefits programs. “One in four Canadians are at a high risk for obstructive sleep apnea, which can be a killer. If your screening identifies people at high risk for sleep apnea, arrange for proper diagnosis and treatment.” Also, consider offering benefits that promote quality sleep, such as blackout drapes, white noise devices and CPAP machines — the preferred treatment for obstructive sleep apnea.
- Provide employees with strategies that improve sleep and alertness, such as what foods to eat on nightshift, when is the best time to exercise, how to manage family and social schedules, etc. “Share information on how to achieve good sleep, how to manage fatigue, and how to live a shiftwork lifestyle. Shiftwork isn’t about a schedule, shiftwork is a lifestyle and they need to adapt to accommodate that lifestyle,” says Mike.
How WSPS can help
Our ergonomic specialists — part of WSPS’ team of technical consultants — can help your workplace explore options for managing fatigue and reducing the risk of fatigue-related incidents. Examples include cognitive demands analysis, shift schedule design, ergonomic assessments to reduce musculoskeletal loading fatigue and more.
* Solaris Fatigue Management works with human factors and fatigue management specialists to provide a comprehensive suite of fatigue related services. Mike Harnett is a frequent speaker at symposia and conferences, including WSPS’ Partners in Prevention 2019 Health & Safety Conference & Trade Show. Find out more about Solaris Fatigue Management.
The High Price of too Little Sleep
The original article appeared in WorkSafe BC Magazine. Article by Sarah Ripplinger
Fatigue is more than just a bad night’s sleep. Being in a chronic state of tiredness has adverse health effects from slow response times to increased vulnerability to disease. Employers can reduce the harm by creating a fatigue risk-management system.
Getting enough sleep is essential for our health, but it’s often easy to believe we can overcome fatigue with another cup of coffee or a splash of cold water to the face. In reality, the rise of digital technology and 24/7 workplaces is changing the way we work, and making it easier to work at any time of the day.
This comes with business benefits in terms of workplace productivity, flexible work schedules, and meeting growing consumer needs. But the flip side is that, according to a sleep review from Dalhousie University, only 26 percent of Canadians get a minimum seven hours of sleep per night. And an estimated 40 to 50 percent of workers are fatigued at work.
“Globally, fatigue has been identified as a contributory factor in many serious and fatal incidents spanning decades. It is having real impacts on workplace health and safety,” says Heather Kahle, a human factors specialist and ergonomist at WorkSafeBC. “Fatigue decreases one’s ability to perceive and process important information necessary for safety. It may also decrease one’s ability to adequately respond to workplace hazards.”
More than feeling drowsy or sleepy, fatigue is an acute or chronic state of tiredness. Disruptions to our body’s natural circadian rhythms — which affect our sleeping and waking cycles — from such things as shift work, long shifts, and back-to-back shifts increase the risk
of workplace fatigue. If left unchecked, fatigue can contribute to long-term health effects, such as a vulnerability to certain types of cancers, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease.
Putting workplace fatigue to bed WorkSafeBC held its inaugural Fatigue Risk Management Symposium on June 7, 2018, to raise awareness of the risks associated with fatigue in the workplace and the importance of addressing them. Nearly 200 professionals from a variety of industries heard from five leading experts on fatigue-related risk in the workplace.
Presentations and discussions covered topics ranging from fatigue risk management to circadian rhythms and how fatigue influences workplace performance. Presenter Mike Harnett, president of Solaris Fatigue Management, emphasized why it’s important for employers to take an active role in preventing fatigue. She notes that fatigue in the workplace only became part of the broader risk assessment dialogue for employers in the past three to four years, largely due to increased reporting on scientific findings that show fatigue impairment is real. Before that, fatigue was often seen as an issue for workers, not employers. Fatigue risk management is a shared responsibility. “We cannot continue to blame the worker and classify the cause of incidents as ‘human error.’” The challenge now, Harnett says, is to continue to raise the profile of fatigue as a risk-management priority. “Management needs to see fatigue as a business issue
and collect metrics to drive informed decision making,” says Harnett. “Only through the collection of objective data can management set targets that support KPIs [key performance indicators]. As we often say in the safety world: What gets managed, gets done.” Managing fatigue from the top down A fatigue risk-management system (FRMS) is a highly useful framework employers can use to proactively identify and evaluate hazards and risks that may result in harm or adverse outcomes. Critical to this undertaking is establishing an integrated, consistent, and trustworthy system-wide approach to identify, assess, and control for the risks that can escalate in the presence of fatigue. Transparent reporting and evaluation policies are also essential ingredients of a successful FRMS. “With fatigue recognized as a key contributory factor in workplace health and safety, FRMS is a solid framework used worldwide to measure, mitigate, and manage the risk of fatigue,” says Kahle. “It can be used to set priorities and establish baseline data to evaluate fatigue management strategies over time to ensure that
targets are being met and the appropriate interventions are being used. “Employers will have fatigued workers in the workplace at some point. It’s important to ask yourself if hazards in the workplace increase the risk of harm or could lead to adverse safety outcomes when workers are
fatigued,” adds Kahle. “When workers miss changes or important information in their environment because of fatigue, it affects everything we do in the workplace. Addressing this can save businesses countless dollars due to injury and lost productivity.” For more information
To assess the level of your daytime sleepiness, check out the Epworth Sleepiness Scale, which is easily searchable online.
Tired Workers Increase Safety Risks
Mike was interviewed for the following article, published on the Business Insurance website in 2017. Author: Louise Esola
How much sleep are employees getting at night? Workplace safety experts are calling this one of the most frequently overlooked but critical questions to answer in employer safety programs due to rising fatigue risks.
The Park Ridge, Illinois-based American Society of Safety Engineers is funding an ongoing study on fatigue through the University at Buffalo in Buffalo, New York. The study, which began in August 2015, is surveying what workers think about fatigue and whether they can recognize the signs in their everyday work life, according to researcher Lora Cavuoto, an assistant professor in the university’s Department of Industrial and System Engineering.
Fatigue is often overlooked in safety programs because “it’s hard to pinpoint the instant it happens,” Ms. Cavuoto said.
“If we think about fall risk, a dominating injury, you can see those points; you can see you have a worker at height and know the mechanism for solving that. It’s fall protection,” she said. “Fatigue is a little more subtle and in the background. Workers might not be aware they are feeling the consequences (of fatigue).”
Michael Trufant, an Asheville, North Carolina-based fatigue awareness program manager for Aeroflow Healthcare Inc., which sells sleep apnea tests, called fatigue an “epidemic.” “You can wear your eye protection, but (fatigue) is where it is,” he said.
“A person who sleeps only four to five hours a day is the same as a (person with a) 0.08 blood alcohol level,” said Mr. Trufant, touting research that’s been echoed over the years by many safety organizations — from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration to the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
The Itasca, Illinois-based National Safety Council put the issue on the forefront of its agenda recently. In 2016, the nonprofit tackling workplace safety issues launched a fatigue initiative, providing statistics on how prevalent the issue is becoming in a report issued in July. And this fall, it is launching a fatigue calculator for employers to gauge how tired their employees are and what risks are created as a result of fatigue.
“The tired employees are increasing safety risk,” said Emily Whitcomb, an Itasca-based senior program manager with the fatigue initiative. “Employers are becoming more interested in this issue (because) of the major consequences it leads to.”
The statistics are alarming, she said, listing some of what she called the most eye-opening in the council’s national survey of 2,000 employees across several industries: 43% of those surveyed reported not getting enough sleep every day; 16% reported falling asleep while driving; and 27% reported falling asleep on the job in the past month.
“That’s scary if you are doing a safety-critical job,” she added. The council also narrowed down a list of nine risk factors that contribute to the likelihood of an accident occurring at work — a list that includes long shifts, demanding jobs and long commutes. “Nearly everyone (at 97%) reported at least one risk factor, and 80% reported at least two. With that, your risk factor increases,” Ms. Whitcomb said.
Experts have long pointed to such high-profile incidences as the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Russia, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in Pennsylvania, the Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska and even the most recent string of collisions at sea involving U.S. naval vessels.
“When we look at the largest incidents in the world, all of them are fatigue-related,” said Mike Harnett, Calgary, Alberta-based vice president of human factors for Six Safety Systems Inc., which delivers solutions in the United States and Canada to reduce worker fit-for-duty risks associated with drugs, alcohol and fatigue in the workplace.
“We constantly blamed the operator, but it’s the flaws in the system we have to look for,” said Ms. Harnett. “That’s not human error; they fell asleep because they were not getting enough sleep.”
The council’s research found that 16% of workers surveyed reported at least one near miss or safety incident because of fatigue.
Ms. Whitcomb said much of the problem exists in current employment culture, which is shifting slowly.
“The hard thing with fatigue is we always see that pushing ourselves, putting sleep to the side, is seen as a badge of honor,” she said. “If you lose sleep and put in your overtime, people think it will pay off in the end.”
Ms. Harnett said corporate policymakers and executives are often behind the curve, as many have “gone through” fatigue to find success. “The harder and the longer they worked, the better it was for promotions,” she said. “We have to convince management they have a problem.”
The latest interventions can be as simple as a questionnaire for workers on sleep habits, both before or after an incident, Ms. Harnett said. Another solution is to train employees on the importance of sleep and to limit longer shifts, she added.
Experts say a burgeoning area is in research and testing for sleep apnea and other conditions that can cause a person to be tired during a workday.
“What we are trying to do is get employers to push sleep health programs and sleep screening,” said Ms. Whitcomb. “We found that 90% of sleep disorders are untreated.”
Are You Too Tired to Perform Safely?
Read Mike’s feature article that appeared in the Journal Ergonomics Canada.
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At work, being awake is not good enough
This article recently appeared in OHS Canada
One of your top workers is rubbing his eyes, yawning and moving slowly. You know that “John” still has four more hours on shift in a safety-sensitive job. You ask him how he is and he responds: “I’m fine, just a little tired.” What do you do? Do you get him a cup of coffee? Make him take a break? Or do you tell John to just be safe out there? What actual written procedures do you have in place for your supervisors to follow?
Fatigue is not simply a state of feeling tired. Fatigue can be a hazard in and of itself, but what is often overlooked is how fatigue can elevate the risk of other hazards you’ve already identified. To prevent errors and incidents from happening, it takes more than just having a worker show up with eyes open.
While there are a number of personal reasons why a worker may be struggling with fatigue, at some point we have to start looking at the flaws in the system — not just the flaws in the worker.
The science is clear: workplaces need to understand their role in the promotion and mitigation of fatigue. The most important factor in their control comes down to the design of work schedules. There are two components to consider in a schedule design — the time of day that the work is being done (circadian factor) and the length of hours on and off duty (homeostasis factor).
Humans are not nocturnal
Based on our circadian rhythms, humans are a diurnal (day-oriented) species. This means we will always perform better and be more alert and safe when working during daylight hours, and get our best sleep during dark nighttime hours. We are at our worst between midnight and 6 a.m. when we are programmed for sleep, and suffer poor sleep when trying to sleep during daytime hours. There is also a dip in our rhythms in the early afternoon (the siesta period), which can also affect alertness and performance. Most importantly, research has demonstrated that less than three per cent of night workers show any physiological adaptation to night shifts. In other words, we have yet to figure out how to turn our species into nocturnal animals. So, while you may think you’ve adapted, the truth is, you’ve adapted to being in a state of impairment — it’s your new normal.
Night-shift risks
Recognizing that shift workers are at higher risk for fatigue and performance impairment, consider the following:
- Do one or more shifts exceed 12 hours in a 24-hour period?
- Do any shifts start or finish between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m.?
- Do changes to a roster, or posting of shift assignments occur with less than two weeks’ notice?
- Are complex or critical tasks scheduled during the high-risk zones?
The longer you’ve been awake, the more sleep pressure builds in the brain due to a depressant called adenosine. The result is that after being awake for 14 hours, sleepiness starts to set in. At 17 hours, you are the equivalent of .05 blood alcohol impairment (BAC). At 18 hours, you will be struggling to stay awake. At 20 hours, you are equivalent to .08 BAC, and your cognitive abilities drop by up to 40 per cent. Back to John. If he works a 12-hour shift, considerations would need to include when he woke up, length of his commute and any other factors that might influence how long he’s been awake, in addition to circadian factors.
If John’s on a night shift, that means a minimum of 12 hours off duty before his next shift. Ask yourself:
- Do some extended hour shifts exceed 12 hours?
- Are more than three consecutive 12-hour night shifts worked?
- Is there less than 12 hours undisturbed rest after a 12-hour night shift?
- Do employees work more than 60 hours in a seven-day period?
- Are there irregular and unplanned schedules as a result of call-outs?
- Is overtime unmonitored?
If you have identified flaws in the scheduling system, that doesn’t mean you have to throw it out. It does mean that you need to put a plan in place to mitigate the risk attached to those flaws.
Because being awake is not enough.