Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe, yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost for the C-suite. It’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi, and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today, I’m very excited to have with me Andrew Moore-Ede. He’s the President of circadian, a research and consulting firm that looks at an incredibly interesting space around people that work extended hours, shift work, and all the above. Andrew, welcome to the show. Really excited to have you with me.

Oh, thanks so much, Eric.

Very happy to be Andrew, first, I think we got to talk about how you got started in this space, because this is an incredibly fascinating, important space, because everything around fatigue and how that plays in to workers and safety is huge.

Yes, very much so. In some ways, I have a unique perspective of that it is a family business. My father actually founded circadian. My bedtime stories were about shift work operations and sleep and learning about all principles from a young age. My father’s story is a very interesting one. He was a shift worker. He was a doctor working 36 hours shifts, a schedule that he would never recommend, we would never recommend. But he tells these stories of working 36 hours shift, getting a 12-hour break, doing another 36 hours shift. Oh, my goodness. Typically, he does three of those a week. He tells some very scary stories about being in an operating room with the scalpel hand in having one of those microsleeps, literally falling asleep above the patient and then waking up. Wow. Reading his notes the next day and being like, this is gibberish. This does not make any sense at all. That got him very interested in this perspective of fatigue, realizing we live in this nonstop 24/7 world and trying to understand what are our human limitations in our nonstop 24/7 world, and also recognizing, Hey, there are times when I feel pretty good, even though I’ve been on my feet for 30 plus hours, and there are times where I consistently struggle.

So, he had already at that point been to medical school, was a doctor, doing his residency. I don’t know what my grandparents thought about it, but he said, you know what? I want to go back to school and study sleep and fatigue and circadian rhythms. So, he went to Harvard Medical School, got a PhD in a field that really didn’t exist at the time, studying sleep and circadian rhythms, has an interesting story about defending his PhD thesis and realizing, I know much more about this than the professors that I’m teaching. And so, defense his PhD, they say, hey, would you like to join the faculty of Harvard Medical School? This is really interesting research. We think you’d be a valuable member of the community. So, he spends the next 5 to 10 years really in a lab studying circadian rhythms, doing studies with both human subjects, animal subjects. And later, he gets contacted by a mine that is running. Six months a year, they run 24/7, and six months a year, they just run day shifts. And they say, we notice when we run 24/7, we have a lot more safety incidents, our productivity numbers go down. 

Our KPIs are all bad. Is there anything you’re learning in your lab that might help us out here in the real world, Professor? And so, he said, Oh, that’s interesting. I’m actually going to be heading your way to attend a conference. Why don’t I swing by, and we’ll spend an afternoon together. And so, he observed, all right, they’re working these shifts that rotate backwards, where they’re going from night shift to evening shift to day shift, which are against circadian principles of moving forward. He noticed, hey, have you ever provided any trends Training on sleep and managing fatigue to your staff? And they said, no, no, we haven’t done all this stuff. This sounds great. Have you done this with lots of other people? And he goes, no, I’ve never done it before, but I’d love to try with you guys. And they said, all right, let’s give it a He spent about six months implementing these biocompatible shift schedules, doing fatigue training, evaluating other circadian principles in the workforce. Over the next year, they had some remarkable things happen. They saw their safety numbers improved dramatically. They saw productivity go up dramatically. As part of this, they agreed to let him publish the paper.

I believe he published it in a very prestigious scientific journal. I can’t remember for which one. So, he said, that was an interesting year of my life. Now I’m going to go back to my lab. It gets picked up by the Wall Street Journal. It gets picked up by the New York Times. Next thing he knows, he has Good Morning America saying, hey, could you come to New York and do a five segment on this. He does it, and he literally talks about going back to his lab at Harvard. It’s about 1983 at this time, and his phone is ringing off the hook, and it is half the Fortune 500 saying, hey, can you do what you did for that mind at our 24-hour operation. That was the light bulb moment, oh, there is a real need for these safety and health services for our shiftwork world. That was the birthplace of Circadian. Interesting. Over the past 40 years, I’ve been there for over 20 of them. We’ve worked with pretty much every type of industry you can imagine that runs extended hours shift work. So, everything from airlines to manufacturing to power to emergency services.

It’s a fascinating world. I know for me, I always wanted to be in a job where I’m actively helping people, creating a better environment, a safer environment. I spent some time working in a sleep lab, which is interesting, learning firsthand, experiencing shift work and studying sleep. I spent some time also working at a biotech company after college, actually studying aging and studying people that live I lived to be 100 or older. And eventually, I worked my way back saying, you know what, dad. Actually, I might take you up on the offer to learn the family trade. And so, I started that about 2004-ish and been there ever since.

Interesting. Fascinating. So, let’s touch on the impact of fatigue in the workplace. You covered a little bit in terms of the 36 hours chefs. It’s well covered that there are risks associated with this type of work. Tell me a little bit about how fatigue impacts a workplace.

Yeah, so it’s interesting. It impacts in many different ways. When we start to look at the individual, we say, all right, what is fatigue? Really, fatigue is a classic form of impairment of Physical and mental impairment, of physical and mental impairment. It has many different causes. We think about sleep-related, the quantity of sleep that you’re getting, the quality of sleep you’re getting, the hours that you’re working, the number of hours you’ve been awake. What happens is when we start to get fatigued, as we see a lot of physical impairment things. We see our reaction times are slower. Our coordination is not as good. We see more slip trips and falls. We just feel like we have less energy. Our battery is low. Everything’s a little bit harder, more difficult. Mentally, too, we see some very interesting things. We see a loss of cognitive and reasoning skills. One of my favorite experiments is also when it comes to risk-taking and judgment. When we perceive risk differently when we are tired. A classic example of this is they’ve actually done research where they have people play poker, and they see, how do I play poker when I’m alert versus when I’m tired?

This is something casinos are well aware of, Eric, so what they see is that when you are tired, you don’t perceive as much risk. You have less fear of consequences. You are more likely to say, you know what? Normally I would fold, but I’m feeling lucky. I’m going to go for it. You take more risks and also the fear of consequences, when something bad does happen, it doesn’t impact you the same way. You don’t take it as hard. You say, oh, last too bad, and you quietly walk out the door of that casino. So, as I mentioned, the casinos love it because you’ve got someone that’s going to take more risk, gamble more money, and when they lose, they quietly walk out the door, as opposed to if you’re fully alert and you lost your money, you might be much more animated, frustrated. We see some classic incident, we When we look at incidents and accidents and we say, all right, what happened? What were the causal factors? Sometimes we’ll see examples, we’re talking about aviation, where you have extremely well-trained pilots, and you start to look at it, and they totally deviated from standard operating procedure.

You start to say, oh, this was a severely tired person. They skipped step two and three and went straight to four. That’s a classic sign. What ends up happening in an operation is that it can impact at many different, so we’ve actually quantified this risk on an individual level at about $15,000 per an employee. So, we see productivity is a huge issue. That typically We see that even looking some really interesting research, looking at 24-hour operations, manufacturing environments, same equipment, same staffing, and they typically have a 10 to 15% productivity deficit at nighttime. And the only explanation is that everything is standard. The machine doesn’t care whether it’s 3 AM or 3 PM, but the human body, the human machine does care. It’s a little bit slower, less productive. We see some of these productivity type of things happens there.

Fascinating. And so, this is even when you have proper rest, it’s just working through the night.  

That’s right. Certainly, there are countermeasures, and through training and education, you can do it, but there is a natural dip in our in our alertness and attention. We see it in 24-hour rhythm, circadian rhythm. Even during the daytime, we know the post-launch dip is a real thing. We see people get tired. We know there are a lot of energy companies that have made a lot of money promoting that 2: 00 PM feeling. On the night shift, too, we know that, especially in those pre-dawn hours, 3: 00 to 5: 00 AM, we see a significant decrease in performance. We see a significant rise in incidents and accidents. And it’s not as simple as saying that someone just fell asleep on the job. That has happened, don’t get me wrong. But oftentimes we see all those things, the feeling sluggish, their lack of coordination, thinking, reasoning. Communication skills can also become diminished as well. So that you might ask me a question. If I’m tired, I’m saying, oh, I’m sorry, Eric, could you ask that again? It didn’t quite click in my brain. So, all those things can contribute to that.

And how can you measure potentially, you talked about impairment, and you talked about the impact. Is there a way an organization can measure how am I doing?

Yes, absolutely. That’s the, I say, million, but in this case, maybe billion-dollar question. That’s something that we often try to strive to work with companies, and how do we create metrics so you can understand this? There’s a very famous business management quote, if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. That’s I think Peter Drucker said that. Yes. That’s the thing we say is, Andrew, we know people are fatigued. We see it. We just intuitively can see it on the faces of people. We see some metrics, but we don’t have a good way to measure it. Some tools that are developed are both some objective tools and then creating a fatigue scorecard. One thing that are very interesting are these biomathematical fatigue risk models. Essentially, what you can do is you can take work schedules. It can either be a paper schedule. It can say this person normally works from this hour to this hour. Many operations have clock in, clock out systems that are tied to payroll systems. And by doing that, we can run it through these models. It can factor in things like commute times, are people usually working within 30 minutes of the workplace?

Is it a 90-minute commute? Is it a two-hour long commute? And then the model will start to build in sleep opportunity. And so, we’ll say, all right, here’s when you’re working, here’s your sleep opportunity. Is it consistent? Are you rotating from days to nights, days to nights? And so that will negatively impact the quality of the sleep and the quantity of the sleep. And then it produces a score from one to 100. And so, to give you an example of this, bankers’ hours. So, someone working Monday through Friday, 9: 00 AM to 5: 00 PM, they typically score a five. You’re classic 24/7, four-cru operation where everyone’s averaging about 42 a week to cover 168 hours a seven-day week. They’re scoring in the 40s. What we’ve seen by entering in millions of hours of work data is when the store starts to creep up to 56, that’s a very significant number, we start the rates of incidents doubles. So, OSHA recordables, doubles. Osha recordables, DOT recordables, safety metrics. Then it starts to take almost like a hockey stick curve of risk. So, all of a sudden you get up to 60 and it might be at a five risk.

And then it comes, it climbs to the point where sometimes we’ll see, all right, did you know this employee is about 60 times greater at risk of having an incident or accident than this employee here? Wow. And we’ve even… So, we’ve done projects were just by looking at that and we’ve looked at incidents within. We’ve got millions of hours of data and incidents to build into the model, but we’ll actually look at different operations and look at different tasks. We’ll say, all right, a driving task, we’re seeing the risk curve raises at this number, whereas for this task, it raises at another number. We can try to create customized fatigue risk profiles for operations. Then that becomes a very informative tool for how they schedule their people. They can say, all right, Eric, you’ve got a thousand people that you’re scheduling. You can quickly see, who are my most at risk employees today? Who are the most at risk employees tomorrow? You can start to say, all right, should we schedule these people differently? Is there to mitigate the risk? Should we check in on them? We can understand what the level of risk is and put countermeasures in place.

That is a very effective tool at looking, especially at both individuals and large groups of populations, to get the temperature of the operation to see how many of our employees are at a high-risk level and then start to proactively try to change our scheduling practices, put in rules in place. All right, once we get to this level, we’re going to have a check-in with the employee and be like, Eric, how are you doing? Let’s look at your work schedules. Do we need to change tasks? Is there anything we can do to make this a safer operation for you? Fascinating. Then there are other objective tools. Some we’ve seen that are maybe better at capturing acute fatigue. So, there are things like reaction time tests, which we see have been very good at capturing both fatigue-related impairment as well as other forms, drug and alcohol impairment as well, where if I’m a manager and I say, Eric, Eric, how are you feeling? Are you okay? Could you take this one-minute iPad reaction time test and just to see how you’re doing? And so, what you can start to do is if you have someone take it enough times, you can start to build a profile for them and you can start to detect if there is some type of impairment going on.

This is taking hold because some of the other assessment tools out there that they use in aviation often is a subjective testing. All right, on a scale of one to five. Are you five, fully alert, wide awake? Are you one, barely keep your eyes open? And pilots, airline pilots, know what? If I say I’m a three, they’re not going to let me fly. So, I’m going to say I’m a four or five. Or sometimes maybe they legitimately are tired, and so it becomes a bit there. But this is a way that you can’t really game the system if you’re doing reaction time test. If I’m tired, I can’t really sum the energy up to improve my score. That tool can be used not necessarily as a red light, green light tool, but as a way to have a conversation. We also see some public safety type of task in transportation, bus drivers, truck drivers as a tool to assess are they fit for duty to perform their job? Then, I mentioned the fatigue scorecard. Other types of things that can be really powerful and easy to do, quite frankly, is to capture, all right, in the past month, how many times did you have an employee that worked an extended shift?

You can change the number, but oftentimes, let’s say you’re running 12 hours shifts, you’re okay. Maybe occasionally that goes to 13 hours because there’s a shift handoff. I need to tell you, hey, Eric, here’s what happened on my shift. Here’s things to keep your eyes on. But then really, we shouldn’t go over 13 hours. So how often are your people working more than 13 hours shifts? Sure. You can see the number of it, and you can start to normalize it. How many times per 1,000 hours worked did this happen? You can say, how many times did people have a short turnaround? Normally, you should have a 12-hour break or a How many times did people have an eight-hour break or less between when they left the plant and then they came back? Then we know if you only have an eight-hour break and then you throw in your commute in showering, saying hi to your family, your opportunity for sleep is Sure. Those are also things at a high level. If I can create a fatigue scorecard that we eventually will try to make go up to the highest levels of the operation. If I’m a COO of an operation, I can look at each facility and say, what are my fatigue scorecard?

How are we trending? Are we getting worse? If it’s trending in the wrong direction, that could be a sign that there’s staffing issues, that something’s going on that needs to be addressed. It’s seeing that iceberg and ahead of time so you can start to plan and improve the operation and make it a safer one.

This episode of the Safety Guru podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, re-energize your BBS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions, Propulo has you covered. Visit us at propulo.com.

It sounds like, obviously, the shift optimization is a big lever. I know I was talking to a CEO a while back, and one of his comments was, I can do things on my end in terms of shift scheduling, capping number of hours, but I don’t control when you go to sleep, I have no idea. If you’re getting the right level of sleep, how long your commute is to go home, because I remember I was talking to somebody who is in public transportation, and their commute was two hours each way. If you arrived at 4: 00 AM, was the end of your shift, you have very limited opportunity to sleep, even if it is maybe an 11-hour period. It’s very limited, and this assumes you fall asleep when you need to.

Yes, absolutely. That is a big thing. There’s this idea of, is fatigue, is it up to the individual, is it up to the company? Really, it’s a joint responsibility. Yes, you can’t tuck your employees into their heads and make sure they’re going to sleep. But what you can do is provide them with the tools and education. One thing we definitely recommend that surprisingly is most shiftwork operations don’t do is provide education and training to their workforce on managing fatigue, sleep, and a shift work lifestyle. So, we’re emphasizing, why do we care about fatigue? So really sell the case. Here’s why on an individual level, you should care about fatigue. Here are things you can do to improve your fatigue. We know a lot of people say, I would love to get better sleep, but coming off a night shift, it’s really hard. We know the average shift worker, night shift worker, coming off a night shift only sleeps about 4. 8 hours, which is a deficit. So, what we say is, all right, well, let’s talk about that. All right, let’s talk about your sleep environment, your bedroom. What can we do to make it conducive to sleep?

What are things you turn off the lights, your head hits the pillow? What are strategies to slow down your mind, relax the body, and help you drift off to sleep? What do you do if you wake up after three hours and you can’t fall back asleep? What are different strategies there? So, try to give people tips and education. And usually people, once they do these things and they start sleeping long they go, wow, I feel better. I have more energy. I’m a better spouse. I’m a better parent. I’m a better employee. Everything’s easier. It’s like riding a bike downhill when you’re well-rested versus riding up a hill when you’re tired. Those are very important things. And even practical things that you might not even think about until you’re working shift work is, all right, it’s 3: 00 AM. I’m hungry. What should I eat? There’s a vending machine. I could grab a bag of potato chips, a candy bar. But one of the second most common health issues among shift workers is gastrointestinal issues, heartburn, indigestion, and a lot of that comes down to eating the wrong foods at the wrong time. So even providing education on here are foods to eat and strategies, we see not only to give you more energy, make you feel better, but also to alleviate some of these health issues that people have as well. 

What’s the impact of the family as well? Because the rest of the family may not be working shift schedule as well.

Absolutely. We often encourage, when possible, to invite spouses and partners to attend this type of training because clearly what happens at home influences what happens at work and vice versa. There are a lot of family and social challenges that need to be addressed. From a sleeping perspective, sometimes it’s making your spouse realize, Yeah, I’m sleeping at 10: 00 AM, but this is not a nap. This is my main sleep block. Just like I wouldn’t wake you up at one o’clock in the morning unless it was an emergency. Same for me, please. Realizing I’ve even had things like, oh, I don’t really like how these light-blocking curtains look. They don’t really go with the decor of the bedroom, but saying, all right, this is why they’re serving a very important case. Sure. Then from a family social perspective, all right, there are times where you will miss out on family events because you’re working during hours and sleeping during hours when the rest of your family are doing things. So, what are strategies to take advantage of your schedule, to take advantage of connecting with the important people in your life? So, I heard a story with a young father said he had two young girls, and they made a habit of once a month, they had a Daddy/Daughter Day, and they found a Saturday or a Sunday where he was not working.

They would put it on the calendar. His daughters would decorate the day, and every day they would go out of the house, they would have lunch together, they’d go see a movie. He said, the movie theaters are nice because I can lean back on the chair. It’s dark, it’s cool and comfortable, so I can take a little nap. I think he said he saw frozen, the movie frozen, about five months in a row with these girls. He said it’s something that just became a tradition that he’s done for 10 years. Every once a month, he takes his daughters out. Just a way to build a relationship with the important people in your life. And same with spouses and partners as well.

Fascinating. What’s the role of corporate culture? Because I know, for example, I was working with one group, and I joked, I said, If I were to take a nap now, shortly in the afternoon, what would you think? The answer is that you work for the Postal Service was the answer. In other words, I think I’m lazy. How does corporate culture play into this?

Yes, that’s a great question. I think it’s realizing, all right, what are your major goals? What are the principles that you’re trying to achieve? Usually, they’ll say, oh, yeah, we want to have a safe environment, a health environment, and a productive environment. Oh, great. Well, then what you just described, Eric, taking a nap is safe, it’s healthy, and it makes you more productive. Clearly, we always advocate it’s better to manage napping than to ban it. We’ll say, all right, if you allow, do you allow breaks in your facility? They said, Yeah, of course, we allow breaks. We say, why do you care whether Eric takes that 15-minute break, 20-minute break, and takes a power nap, or he’s on his phone scrolling through the news. It’s his free time. He can do it. In fact, I’d say Eric’s being very productive and responsible by taking that power nap. And what we know is that power nap actually is going to boost your energy for the next three to four hours, which is going to make you a more productive employee, which is good for the business. So, we want to state this. So, I think one thing I’ve noticed over my 20-year career is that I did run across a lot of managers who said, put their head in the sand and said, I fatigue, I don’t want to know about it, I don’t want to hear about it, just suck it up and deal with it.

And I’ve seen more and more managers say, no, we want to be fatigue, risk informed. We realize this is an issue, and we will be a better operation by proactively addressing it and trying to improve it. We see this principle of trying to install fatigue risk management plans and systems into the corporate culture.

You touched on it a little bit before as well. Well, you talked about acute versus more the chronic shift schedule element. Are there some differences in terms of how you manage in those cases? Because even in some professions, you may people that are on call, and then their shift could be disrupted or unexpected and hard to prepare for. You could also have periods where there could be acute stress. I’m thinking right now, California wildfires. You’ve got first responders that are working incredibly long days nonstop because it isn’t an end to it right now.

Yeah, absolutely. In those emergency situations, there definitely are different strategies that are employed. Usually, there are ways, Art, if we need to work longer, harder to deal with an emergency, you will start to implement some different strategies. Acute fatigue, so maybe the past 24, 48 hours, I built up a sleep deficit. I’ve been staying up longer hours. There are strategies that you can mitigate through. We talked about napping strategies. Caffeine and a nap is a very effective strategy where you can consume some caffeine, a cup of coffee, whatever your caffeine, it’s a medium of choice is. Take that 10-to-15-minute power nap, wake up, have the benefit of the nap, plus the caffeine kicking into your system, and that can really help the next four, five, six hours there. With any type of activity, we want to know, all right, what is the risk factor? Are you at a desk or if you nod off, you’re not going to be productive, but there’s no danger, or are you fighting a fire, and if you nod off, you might burn yourself severely. Death is a potential consequence there. Then you also look at the rotating people in and out, having more micro breaks built into the structure, checking in more often working in teams, not allowing people to be alone.

There are strategies like that. Interestingly, I mentioned fatigue risk models. We have a fatigue risk model at circadian. It looks at both chronic fatigue as well as acute fatigue. We can look minute by minute, what’s your acute fatigue score? Interestingly, we see chronic fatigue as a much better predictor of an incident or accident. Interesting. We’re more concerned about that individual who’s just over a period of two weeks, a month, is just having a very high fatigue score versus someone who has a bad 24 to 48 hours. It’s almost a shot on goal principle that if you’re saying that when you have chronic fatigue, you’re having a lot more opportunities, a lot more shots on goal where something bad can happen, versus if it’s acute fatigue, there’s just not quite as much of an opportunity there. Not to say acute fatigue clearly is very dangerous, but usually when we often look at serious incidents, it’s a combination of chronic fatigue mixed in with a really bad bout of acute fatigue as well occurring in there. Those are certainly elements that we look at as well.

I still can’t imagine 46 hours shift that your dad would go through and how that can be deemed a good idea if you’re about to run a surgery.

I know it is, and I’ve talked to doctors about it, and you hear, I mean, I guess their argument is that All right, I get to see the whole life cycle of a patient. So, I get to see the patient walk in the door. I get to say, all right, what’s going on? Let me run some tests. I get to see the results of the test. All right, let’s try this treatment, this procedure, and then see the Hopefully, make them feel better, cure them, and walk them out the door. But the argument is, we know you can be as impaired after being awake for 22 consecutive hours, you perform the same way as if you’re legally drunk with a point weight alcohol level. So, you’d say, would you ever want your doctor to be drunk and performing surgery on you? They would say, No way. Whereas we know that can happen on these circumstances when people are up for 24, 36 consecutive hours.

Powerful stories around why an organization can and should look at how you manage your shifts, how you deploy the workforce, because there’s a lot of things that you can drive to mitigate risks. I’m sure that this element of fatigue is far more present in far more businesses. You talked about shift workers or shift work being almost 20% of the population.

That’s right. It’s estimated about one out of five employees in the industrialized world as a shift worker. We usually describe that or identify that as someone who’s working routinely between the outside of the hours of 6: 00 AM to 6: 00 PM. That could be someone working night shifts, rotating shifts, evening shifts, early morning shifts, extended shifts. It’s a huge % of the population.

Definitely, much of that work is in high hazard circumstances or in circumstances when you can impact somebody else’s life, like you talked about health care workers. Phenomenal example really appreciates you sharing those stories with me, Andrew, and hope that you have a positive effect on others, because too often what I hear is, well, I’m following the law because there is requirements, there’s legislation that gives you minimum requirements, but that’s not enough.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s one thing. Unfortunately, Sunrooms, we are brought into an operation because they had a safety incident, a serious safety incident, and they’ve identified fatigue as a causal factor in it. And so, we will go in, do a risk assessment, and then start to implement solutions. We’ll look at staffing levels, we’ll look at their shift schedules, we’ll implement training programs, look at the work environment, look at the fatigue monitoring tools and culture. We come there to address a safety incident. We don’t want this safety incident to happen again. All of a sudden, they realize, oh, wow, a year later, we’ve seen not only has our safety improved, but our productivity has gotten better. I guess what employee morale has gotten better, and all of a sudden, that turnover issue has improved. We have less people leaving work. Our absenteeism has gotten better. It can really help stabilize the operation. Safety in general is always well worth, is well demonstrated helps with productivity. And this fatigue risk management in a 24/7 world clearly shows those benefits.

And I think there’s also sometimes other factors inside a company that I’ve seen that It’s going to indirectly impact shift scheduling because over time, as an example, can be a very big financial lever for some workers. It sometimes in sense the wrong behavior and try to hide the challenge of it, even in terms of when you talked about the iPad test, if it’s less than a three, you’re not going to fly, so you’re going to think twice because you may need that shift.

Yes, and that’s definitely a major issue. We see oftentimes you have about 20% of the workforce working 80% of the overtime. I’m not against someone working overtime at all. I see there’s huge financial benefits. It’s great from an operational management standpoint as well. We just try to make sure that it’s done within a risk-informed safety culture. We realized, hey, we’re not against you working overtime. We just want to make sure that you are going to be able to do it safely and effectively. Because at the end of the day, our ultimate responsibility is that you go home safe and sound. That’s where I often say we’re not trying to have a green light, red light system. We’re trying to understand with you, all right, are you good to go? What can we do to help you out? Occasionally, there will be cases where someone will recognize, Yeah, I have a young baby at home. I did not sleep well at all. I’m exhausted. I acknowledge maybe this isn’t the best idea right now for me to be working in this safety-sensitive environment. That’s really the mission is where we’re trying to achieve here is create a safer, more productive environment.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much for joining me, Andrew. Somebody wants to get in touch with circadian or with yourself, what’s the best way to do that?

Sure. You can go to our website, www.Circadian.com, like a circadian rhythm, and also you can call our main line, 781-439-6300. I’m on LinkedIn as well as on Andrew Moore-Ede at circadian, probably be the way to find me. But yeah, by all means, be happy to get in much and help in any way we can.

Excellent. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Eric. Appreciate it.  

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.