Fatigue Management
Posted: 15 Sep 2026, 18:31
What is the way to best understand and report fatigue for personnel working in shifts?
For shift personnel, fatigue is best treated as a risk exposure, not simply as hours worked. The most useful approach is to combine roster-based fatigue exposure + actual working hours/overtime + fatigue indicators + critical-task exposure.
I would recommend having three levels of fatigue KPIs.
A. Exposure indicators — leading indicators
These tell management how much fatigue risk the roster is creating.
Examples:
% shifts exceeding company fatigue threshold
% shifts with insufficient minimum rest
Number of consecutive night shifts
Number of shifts exceeding 12 h
Number of employees exceeding monthly working-hour threshold
Overtime hours/person/month
% personnel working during circadian low period
% roster deviations
% shifts where planned break requirements were not achieved
For example:
Fatigue exposure rate = Fatigue-risk shifts / Total shifts × 100
This is much more useful than simply reporting "3 fatigue cases."