Managing fatigue is everyone's responsibility

Fatigue goes beyond simply feeling tired or drowsy. Fatigue can be physical, mental or emotional exhaustion (or a combination) that impairs a worker’s ability to work safely and efficiently.

Best practice

Everyone in your workplace, from workers to supervisors, plays a role in managing fatigue (PDF, 106KB) .

Create a safe culture that values reporting of work tasks and processes that could result in workers feeling fatigued so that these can be identified and safety measures implemented.

Consult with workers to establish a shared responsibility in the management of fatigue-related risks.

Why this is important

As an employer you have a work health and safety (WHS) duty to prevent fatigue.

Workers also have a duty to take reasonable care for their own health and safety to make sure their actions don’t adversely affect the health or safety of others.

When returning to work, people with an injury report fatigue as being one of the hardest challenges to overcome. The fitness for work, extra concentration, thinking, moving and socialising that many jobs require can be tiring while managing pain and recovering from an injury.

What actions can I take now?

• Identify aspects of work which may result in worker fatigue and implement policies and procedures to manage these hazards and risks.
• Give your injured worker a quiet environment without distractions, where possible, at the initial return to work stage.
• Assist your injured worker with a gradual return to work plan. Provide the opportunity to return to work on reduced hours, days or duties and slowly increase these over a period of 4 to 6 weeks.
• Identify the hazards that may cause fatigue in the workplace.
• Provide an environment that considers good work design.
• Have a workplace policy to provide important information and ensure everyone involved understands the business processes for managing fatigue.
• Provide information and training on fatigue and management strategies.
• Promote worker health and wellbeing through providing programs such as an Employee Assistance Provider (EAP) and engagement of early intervention health services.
• Monitor and review reported hazards and incidents where fatigue is identified as a contributing factor.

Your toolkit

• Read Safe Work Australia’s Guide for managing the risk of fatigue at work
• Provide your workers with a copy of Safe Work Australia’s Fatigue management – a worker’s guide.
• Check out Preventing and managing fatigue-related risk in the workplace (PDF, 1.45 MB) for strategies on how to manage fatigue in your workplace.
• Consider what extra support or information is needed to support ‘at risk’ groups such as labour hire and shift workers.
• Listen to the podcast Alert at work – a practical approach to identifying and managing workplace fatigue risks.