Taking action on driver fatigue

Tiredness is a key safety concern for all businesses whose workers carry out hazardous tasks, as the resulting inattention can lead to mistakes being made. Too often the result can be injury or worse, and fatigue-related road incidents can be especially severe in impact. 

The truth about tiredness

Imagine you’ve just finished a busy day at the office. You get in the car, eager to get home. Thoughts of the day fade into the background as you head out on the road. Before you know it, you’re pulling up on your own driveway, and realise that you can’t recall very much about the journey. What was actually going on during the drive home?

It’s possible that you experienced some of the effects of fatigue, which translated into a lack of attention on your driving, reduced ability to concentrate, and possibly even ‘micro-sleeps’, during which your brain was attempting to shut down for rest.

This type of experience is all too common, even among people who spend only a small proportion of their time driving, and whose daily lives involve standard daytime working hours. It may even be viewed as the norm or be attributed to mere boredom; dismissed as a simple byproduct of overfamiliarity with one’s commute. It’s not as if you ‘fell asleep at the wheel’. Or is it?

Why focus on fatigue?

The reality is that such low-level examples of the effects of driver fatigue represent the thin end of a wedge. Our need for sleep accumulates over the course of all waking activity, whatever we happen to be doing. ‘Burning the candle at both ends’ is common for many people, both in work and in home life, and can result in the body attempting to claw back sleep during our waking hours. It’s easy to see how the comfort of a driver’s seat and the monotony of a familiar car journey might serve as the triggers for your brain to decide it’s a good time to switch off.

The thick end of the wedge is where many workers find themselves on a daily basis. Combine sleep deficit with other fatigue-inducing factors such as physically or mentally draining work tasks, early morning starts, driving after dark, irregular shift patterns or having to work longer hours at short notice, and you have a worrying recipe for fatigue-related road incidents especially amongst certain profiles of employees. 

Is fatigue just for drivers to manage?

What can be done to alleviate the situation for people who drive for work? As a manager, what would you do if an employee came to you and said they felt tired to the extent that it might affect their ability to carry out their job safely? Would your advice be in line with company policy, and if so, does that policy contain the elements necessary for empowering employees and their managers to take genuinely helpful action on fatigue?

IAM RoadSmart’s free webinar takes place at 12:30 on Wednesday 29^th January, and will take a look at these issues and how managers might look to address them. Click here to register.