While it is normal to occasionally feel tired or drowsy after doing physically or mentally strenuous work over a long period of time, when that tiredness turns into fatigue it can threaten both the health of the workers and the productivity of the business.
Fatigue is the acute state of tiredness that leads to mental or physical exhaustion. It occurs when people are pushed past their normal boundaries by working long hours, with intense or physical effort, or without adequate rest or natural time for sleep.
Factors that Lead to Fatigue
Work-related factors that can contribute to fatigue include poor scheduling, overly long shifts, insufficient recovery time between shifts, harsh environmental conditions, and inadequate rest breaks. Time of day also can be a factor: Grave shift workers tend to be more prone to fatigue than others.
External contributing factors can include poor sleep quality, social life, family demands, other employment, travel time and sleep disorders.
Fatigue causes many short-term and long-term effects that can directly impact a business. Short-term effects include the inability to concentrate or avoid distraction, poor decision making, and the inability to remember or recall important information or sequences.
Long-term effects include health problems such as heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, gastrointestinal disorders, depression and anxiety.
Fatigue Prevention
Preventing fatigue requires looking at the contributing factors that may be causing employees to being overly tired to the point that it effects productivity. These include:
- Mental and physical demands of work
- Work scheduling and planning
- Working time
- Environmental conditions
- Individual factors and external factors
A good place to start is often looking at the nature of manual tasks workers are required to perform. Workers who perform repetitive manual tasks without regular rest breaks are more prone to fatigue and/or injury.
Another consideration is the length and scheduling of work shifts. Workers who are on the job for longer than the standard eight-hour work shift or are often more prone to fatigue. Scheduling consecutive work shifts without adequate rest time in between also can increase the risk of fatigue.
Environmental Fatigue Factors
Exposure to noise, heat, chemicals and other environmental hazards can also increase fatigue. Taking steps to reduce or control these types of exposure can often help manage the risk of worker fatigue.
To prevent workplace fatigue, a good approach is to monitor, evaluate and review procedures. If there are a high number of workplace accidents during a particular shift, for example, it may indicate a need to control the risk factors that can lead to fatigue.
Look also at absenteeism, staff turnover, near misses, injuries and other factors to determine if they can be attributed to fatigue.
Applying Solutions to Reduce Fatigue
Once the contributing factors in the workplace have been identified, reducing fatigue is often simply a matter of going back and retrofitting solutions to your highest risk situations. This can include such things as changing work schedules so that they are shorter, requiring workers with jobs that require high-intensity physical and mental labor to take more frequent breaks, and requiring the use of safety equipment to reduce exposure to environmental hazards.
Fatigue can have a profound effect on the productivity — and profitability — of the workplace. But identifying and controlling the factors that contribute to fatigue can make workers safer, more rested, and happier in their work.