Dashpivot Article – How to Prevent Fatigue in the Workplace

How to Prevent Fatigue in the Workplace

Why is it Important to Know How to Prevent Fatigue in the Workplace?

Fatigue in the workplace is a 'silent killer', which has a number of impacts, some obvious, and some more subtle.

The most obvious impact that fatigue has it that it decreases a workers productivity because they are 'tired', but it doesn't just slow a worker down, it impacts their decision making ability which can have dramatic safety impacts on themselves and others.

Fatigue is also more than physical tiredness, it can and usually does involve mental fatigue stemming from long hours or long shifts, which is where the impaired decision making really kicks in.

Knowing how to prevent fatigue in the workplace creates a safer environment for all. If on a construction site as an example, decreasing fatigue in the workplace improves safety for internal employees, contractors, site visitors and pedestrians around the construction site as well.

The 'how to prevent fatigue in the workplace' should be a question we can all answer.

Workplaces that need to focus on Preventing Fatigue in the Workplace

Workplace fatigue can happen in any setting, but we will focus on fatigue in industrial style workplaces here (construction sites, transport and logistics, mining etc.) because it is super common, and because 'safety' in these industries is a core function of their businesses where they are actively thinking about how to prevent fatigue in the workplace.

This is also where the concept of fatigue commonly differs to what people think of as 'tired'. In these industrial workplaces, workers can be working for 14 days on, or extremely long shifts, which results in proper fatigue.

On these work sites, fatigue also has a larger impact. If someone in an office setting is fatigued, it probably impacts their productivity, but the peripheral effects are limited. On a construction site, fatigue can result in:

Major incidents between people, plant and equipment
Workers not doing proper risk assessments before conducting works
Workers not engaging in correct permit to work procedures before excavating etc.

These fatigue mishaps can results in injury, multi-million dollar mistakes, and death, hence preventing fatigue in the workplace for these companies is priority number one (1).

You can see more specific safety KPIs and data related to the heavy industries here.

Techniques on how to Prevent Fatigue in the Workplace

Here are some effective techniques for preventing workplace fatigue:

Fatigue Risk Assessment in Demanding Conditions

Conduct regular risk assessments, especially in demanding environments with heat exposure, long shifts, tough conditions etc. are common.

Optimise Shifts in Continuous Operations

For operations that run continuously or in shifts, optimise schedules to align better with sleep cycles. Lots of mega projects have a focus around night shifts given less traffic etc., and having good handover times and shift handover processes can make a big difference in fatigue.

Limiting Overtime

Many high risk work activities require high levels of concentration. People performing these activities should be fresh and not fatigued, so don't put overtime pressures on people performing these type of activities.

Rest Areas in Remote or Extensive Work Sites

Create deliberate rest areas on construction, mining and similar sites, and denote rest areas on journey management plans if workers are performing long shifts on the road.

Giving people a space where they can rest away from activity, noise, heat, stress etc. provides them with a reprieve from fatigue factors.

Task Rotation in Repetitive Work Scenarios

Rotate tasks consistently when they are repetitive, such as on manufacturing lines and many other industrial activities. Implement timers and alarms to keep people moving on repetitive tasks.

Repetition impacts fatigue, especially mental fatigue, and rotating tasks helps.

Raise awareness around how to prevent fatigue in the workplace

As with all aspects of workplace safety, preventing fatigue in the workplace comes largely down to putting a spotlight on it. Making people aware that the company sees fatigue as a problem and cares about preventing it gives workers permission to care about it too.

Toolbox talks (often called tailgate meetings in North America) are a great way to quickly and effectively make workers aware of the effects of fatigue in their work. They enable a group of workers, led by a supervisor or HSEQ person to discuss fatigue in a formal yet casual setting on a regular basis, agree on specific risks associated with current works or projects, and band together around reducing the chance of fatigue related incidents.

You can use this toolbox talk fatigue template for your next talk as a framework for discussing fatigue, which is also demonstrated below.

Having structured safety documentation makes all the difference in managing safety, and proving that safety was well managed in the case of fatigue related incident.

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Use the above form to better explain how to prevent fatigue in the workplace to your workers

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Keep focusing on all elements of safety

Safety management is often focused around recent safety issues, which makes sense, as they are top of mind.

The difficulty with fatigue in general is that safety incidents are often related to fatigue, even when the output is not obviously fatigue.

For example, an excavation incident might be blamed on excavation specific processes, when really the issue stemmed from fatigue.

The main way to combat this is to apply the above fatigue prevention techniques all the time, and review how you are preventing fatigue in the workplace on a regular basis, so that you have a fresh and unfatigued group of people who are less likely to make mistakes and harm themselves and others around them.