Risk management conference speaker: manage fatigue or face liability

Fatigue risk management is vital for organisations operating 24/7 to improve employee wellbeing and avoid liability, says Bill Sirois, Senior Vice-President and Chief Operating Officer of US-based Circadian Technologies Inc.

Sirois is a keynote speaker at the Risk Management Institution of Australasia’s (RMIA) annual conference ‘Risk management: the road to resilience’ in Cairns, on 22-25 November. He states that companies that operate around the clock put their employees at “tremendous disadvantage”.

Shift work is known to create physical stress and social conflict that diminishes quality of life and increases health and safety risks. The negative impacts of shift work for companies include increased staff turnover and absenteeism, and higher health costs.

Sirois comments that fatigue caused human error, with subsequent incidents creating high costs and potential liability.

According to Sirois, there has been an increase in the US in liability actions taken after shift workers had been killed driving home from work. However, Sirois says there are risk management methodologies to mitigate the potential impact of shift work. These begin with an assessment of existing policies, practices and procedures - many of which could prove to be counterproductive.

Sirois adds that appropriate staffing levels and changing schedules to ensure employees received adequate sleep were risk mitigation techniques that could be implemented. Organisations need to alleviate burdens that inhibit human performance.

He says sleep disorders are "rampant” among shift workers, but organisations can implement programs to overcome them, which must then be measured, monitored and tracked.

A worker must come to work fully rested, fit for duty, alert and able to sustain that for a full shift, be it eight, 10 or 12 hours. Sirois says the length of a shift is not the overriding factor, but the time at which the shift was performed. Many workers performed better with longer, but fewer shifts in a working week, because there was less cumulative fatigue.

For overworked executives and managers, Sirois says the best strategy is a 20-minute power nap daily. That could equate to a four-hour boost to alertness and productivity.

Sirois will expand on ways to deal with sleep deprivation and fatigue when he presents at the RMIA conference.