The Importance of Training for Sustainable, High Performance Shift Work
Accidents, safety risks, and human error plague shift work at all hours of the day and night. Many managers see these dangers as a necessary evil that rides along with workers on shifts, especially rotating shifts and night shifts. Productivity also sinks as the shifts run into the late night/early morning hours, and extended hours workers take far more time off for illness than normal hours workers. This article shows specific ways that training managers together with shift workers raises productivity, decreases worker absences, and improves worker adaptation to the shift and night work lifestyle.
Throughout the history of shiftwork, managers have accepted the inevitability of the safety, health and performance challenges created by work-hours patterns in multi-shift operations. The types of problems faced by these managers include the following:
– Worker errors are over twice as frequent on night shifts as compared to day and evening shifts.
– The majority of severe accidents occur between the hours of 1:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m.
– When output per hour is compared across comparable shift run times, night shifts have an average of 18% lower productivity levels than evening shifts, which have the highest output rates. Early-morning shifts that start before 7:00 a.m. have productivity rates more similar to night shifts than to day shifts.
– Shift workers have twice as many long-term absences due to digestive disorders and gastrointestinal disease than do day workers.
– Shiftworkers, including those on fixed and rotating shift schedules, sleep an average of 2 to 3 hours less per day than day workers, creating numerous health and performance risks.
– As the Wall Street Journal reported in 1988, sleeping problems in U. S. workplaces are costing companies an estimated $70 billion annually in lost productivity, high medical bills, and industrial accidents.
As serious as these problems have been, historically, little action was taken to correct these impediments to operational excellence. As a result, health, safety, and performance challenges have continued to mount. Today, for example, cognitive and physical fatigue in U. S. workplaces today are costing companies an estimated $136.4 billion annually in health-related costs and lost worker productivity1—a 95% increase in costs over the past 20 years.
For the most part, the inaction of the past has been due to an erroneous assumption among managers and employees alike that shiftwork problems cannot be solved, and that no real change in performance is possible. As one General Manager at a 100-year-old Alcoa smelter recently explained it, “We didn’t know there was anything we could do to offset the challenges of 24/7 operations. We just thought – shiftwork has always created problems for us, but what can we do about it? It just is what it is.”
Fortunately, sustainable improvements in business performance are possible when direct shiftwork interventions are implemented. Over the past 20 years, field data collected by Round-The-Clock Systems have documented many positive changes in 24-hour, 7-day and 24/7 operations. Specifically, the following benefits have been realized in workplaces that directly addressed their shiftwork challenges:
• Absenteeism reductions of 15% to 35%
• Accident/injury reductions of 15% to 25%
• Turnover improvements of 25% to 60%
• Productivity increases of 18% to 39%
• Production incidents/errors decreased by 25% to 48%
• Health care cost savings of 17% to 37% in self-insured businesses
While a range of shiftwork solutions have contributed to these impact results, in every case, training of managers together with shiftwork personnel has been the key factor in producing larger, sustainable gains in key performance indicators. In fact, when other shiftwork solutions have been combined with management training, impact results have increased by 12% to 28% over solutions implemented without such management training. Impact results for shiftwork employee training programs delivered as stand-alone courses show an average ROI of 667% to 2,225%, depending on the scope of the training and the extent of follow-up reinforcement provided. The average ROI for shiftwork management training delivered on its own is 2,508%.
As these impact data demonstrate, shiftwork management and employee training courses are critical to the long-term success of multi-shift enterprises. These benefits derive from the effects that such training has on managers’ and employees’ change capacity as well as the strategies they implement following these shiftwork courses. The specific effects include:
Managers
• Effective training results in an 85% average increase in managers’ knowledge of the root causes of shift-related safety, health and performance problems.
• Targeted shiftwork management training creates a 91% average improvement in managers’ ability to select the most cost-effective solutions for their specific operational challenges.
Shift Employees
• Effective shiftwork lifestyle training results in a 94% increase in employees’ pre-training knowledge about the real root causes of their shift-related health, safety and performance challenges.
• After completing shiftwork training, 91% of employees—including those with 20+ years on shiftwork—believe that they can adjust more effectively to their work hours, and 87% make a commitment to implement strategies for shift work success.
• Longitudinal research has demonstrated that, left on their own, shift employees require an average of seven years before they are even partially adjusted to new work hours and about 70% never fully adjust (Tepas et al., 1993; Folkard & Hunt, 2000). When provided with an initial shiftwork orientation course that is followed by a more in-depth, behavior-based shiftwork education program, shift employees adjust successfully in three months and sustain those gains across years, as evidenced by their positive productivity, health and safety records.
All of these findings point to the vital importance of effective shiftwork training for managers, supervisors, and shift employees in multi-shift operations.
Importantly, though, the content of shiftwork training must be comprehensive in order to achieve these documented effects. The specific content that needs to be covered in shiftwork management training in order to achieve these sustainable gains are: the current shift mindset versus a round-the-clock work system mindset; the human “body clock” and its effects on employee health, safety and performance; cultural and environmental factors that facilitate and hinder shiftwork readiness among supervisors and employees; strategic staffing and scheduling practices; and effective policies and practices for multi-shift operations. For shift employees, the core content of any training program must include: the shiftwork readiness mindset; the body’s circadian rhythm system; the human sleep cycle and microsleep dangers; effective shiftwork nutrition and eating practices; cognitive and physical fatigue prevention; and on-shift alertness techniques. Additionally, it is recommended that shiftwork family members participate in shiftwork education and that the topics of social and family life on shiftwork be addressed. Delivered with such comprehensive content, shiftwork training can create sustainable changes in the mindset and performance capabilities of both organizational leaders and shift employees.
1 Ricci, JA, Chee, E, Lorandeau, AL & Berger, J. Fatigue in the U.S. workforce: prevalence and implications for lost productive time. Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 1007, 49(1): 1-10.
Prepared by:
Round-The-Clock Systems
Susan L. Koen, Ph.D.
CEO/Founding Principal
February 2008
©2008workingnights
This material is provided for personal, non-commercial, educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute a recommendation or endorsement
Tags: health costs, Safety, sleep, training
