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During conversations with employees, I find that an extraordinary number experienced their first motivating "involvement" experience in a shift schedule improvement project. In fact, shift schedule improvement may be the earliest historical employee involvement process in this country that has been carried out in a positive, highly motivated atmosphere. Managers are alerted, committees are formed. Eventually, all shift employees are involved in the project.
Safety, quality, and productivity are important to most employees, especially those in well-run management systems. However, the around-the-clock shift schedule, due to its pervasive and personal impact, looms as an inescapably huge factor in the employee's life. Working hours, sleeping hours, family, alertness, level of energy, community, optimism, and personal activities are all tightly wired to the schedule.
Typically, as a department's archaic (often 7day rotating) schedule wears down workers and worries managers with increasing incidents and health questions, a pioneering employee or supervisor senses that the time is ripe for a change. This individual then alerts management and employees in the department, and the problem-solving process is begun.
A lively three-months-to-a-year project ensues when a scheduling improvement committee is installed to involve employees, supervisors, and managers. Brainstorming sessions, improvement suggestions, detailed analyses, supervisor/employee polls, and formal proposals begin to enliven the atmosphere.
Employees' enthusiasm for involvement in scheduling can be magnified by management as a powerful tool to initiate long-term employee involvement in safety and continuous improvement. Any new schedule approval requires the scrutiny and discussion of a multitude of factors-accident statistics, near misses, sleeping-on-shift stories, fatigue reports, burnout, fitness, health concerns, productivity, even quality and pay raise issues. By approval date, the schedule committee has kicked up numerous safety and health factors that have been buried in the statistics or not previously attributed to shiftwork practices.
JOB MONOTONY
Expensive, unexplainable incidents often are caused by inattention, which is brought on by job monotony. Inattention errors due to monotony can be deadly for employees. The monotony is caused by repetitious tasks, lack of challenging tasks, or late-night shifts when all becomes too quiet and communications cease. Committees find various ways to reduce this monotony: pairing workers to increase stimulus level, introducing radios, colorizing and lighting work areas, encouraging breaks in well-lit, stimulating break rooms.
Repetitious tasks can often be rotated,...