This is a presentation delivered at FMM2020 OSH Conference

1. Shiftwork,
Wellbeing and
Productivity
Associate Professor Dr Lilis Surienty
School of Management
Universiti Sains Malaysia

2. Guess in which Country is this type of work
practiced?
Many in this country are working, but poor. Along with low wages
and few benefits, the working poor frequently find themselves up against
erratic work schedules, with hours and shifts that change day-to-day and
week-to-week with little advance notice. Particularly in the food-service and
retail sectors, which employ 17% of these workers, such unstable and
unpredictable work schedules are widespread.
Among 30,000 employees at 120 of the largest retail and food-service firms
in this country, the large majority of workers have little advance notice of
their schedules: two-thirds have less than two weeks’ notice, and half of
those get less than a week’s notice. Workers’ schedules are also often
changed at the last minute, with 14% reporting at least one cancelled shift in
the last month and 70% reporting at least one change to the timing of one of
their shifts in the past month. Many workers are expected to work on-call
shifts (25%) and back-to-back closing-then-opening shifts separated by less
than 11 hours (“clopenings”) (50%).

4. • Shift work is introduced for
purely economic reasons in
order to maximize the use
of costly equipment.
• Continuous production with
smaller cost (trained staffs
and smaller size resources)

5. Source: Lambert, S., & Henly, J. (2010). Work Scheduling Study: Managers Survey Result. University of Chicago.
Business Challenges: Meeting Business Needs What is your strategy for
staffing and scheduling
use to meet business
objectives?

6. INTRODUCTION –
WHY SHIFTWORK MATTERS?
• Efficiency and safety on shift systems is a topic
of major concern. A number of ‘headline’
incidents, such as The Northsea Oil Rig
Disaster, Bhopal, Three Mile Island,
Chernobyl, the Rhine chemical spillage, the
Exxon Valdez, and Deepwater Horizon
Explosion all occurred at night, and have
drawn attention to both the risk and cost of
impaired safety on shift systems.
• Evidence reviewed clearly indicates that both
productivity and safety may be compromised
at night.

7. The Nature of Night Shifts
• Longer duration
• Supervision is normally reduced at night,
• No maintenance personnel available to ensure that equipment is
running efficiently,
• Substantially fewer injuries were reported on the night shift than
during the day, i.e in-house clinic closed at night, women nursing vs
guard.
• 2nd Job

8. Shifts Pattern – Brief Survey
Company A
(American)
• 4 shifts (ABCD)
• 7am to 7pm
• 7pm to 7am
• A&B/ C&D –
paired shift.
• A – Day/B- Night
(2 days before
Off days (C&D -
Off)
Company E (Japan)
• 3 shifts (ABC)
• 0800 to 2000
• 2000 to 0800
• 2 shifts/ 1 off
• A – Day/B-
Night (C – Off)
Company C (Japan)
• 2 shifts (AB)
• 0730 to 1530
• 1530 to 2400
• 2 shifts
• 2 groups.
Company D
(American)
• 2 shifts (ABC)
• 7am to 7pm
• 7pm to 7am
• A – Day/B-
Night(2 days
before Off days
(C – 2 days Off)
Company B (Msian)
• 3 shifts (ABCD)
• 1530 to 2330
• 0730 to 1530
• 2330 to 0730
• 3 shifts/ 1 off
• 2 days same shift
for 3 groups/1
group Off 2 days.

9. Night Shift Defined
Night-shift work has been defined as at least 8 hours of work during night-
time. These include (i) permanent night schedule (only night-shift work for
5 days, alternating with 2 days off and the cycle continues), day–evening–
night (day shift, followed by evening shift and night shift) and day–night (5
days of night-shift work followed by 2 days off and continued with 5 days
of daywork, and the cycle continues) work schedules.
Night-shift workers were those working at least four night shifts in a
month, 5 and non-night-shift work comprised permanent daytime and
day–evening shift schedules. (ii) Permanent daytime schedule involves
work during normal office hours. Day– evening shift schedule was defined
as participants who work daytime and continued with overtime work (at
least 4 hours after 17:00 for at least three times in a week), or participants
who did rotational shift alternating between morning and evening shift
work.

11. Shiftwork & Productivity

12. Source: Lambert, S., & Henly, J. (2010). Work Scheduling Study: Managers Survey Result. University of Chicago.
Business Challenges: Service Quality & Profitability
How Challenging is
Limiting Hours to
Meeting Business
Opportunities?

13. Health care in a hospital
• Work schedules changed every day.
• Patients would hardly ever have the same
nurse.
• More than half of nursing teams only
worked together one day in a month.
• There were problems in information
sharing, problems at discharge.
Business Challenges: Service Quality & Error Free
Source: Messing, K (2019). Closing the Empathy Gap: Learning about work
from the people who do it. Presentation in Seoul, Korea.

14. Source: Lambert, S., & Henly, J. (2010). Work Scheduling Study: Managers Survey Result. University of Chicago.
Business Challenges: Retaining and Turnover

17. Shiftwork and Productivity
• A relatively massive ‘dip’ in these
efficiency measures during the course of
the night shift, i.e. from ~22:00 h to
06:00 h, with the trough occurring at
03:00 h
• Indeed, these measures had fallen below
average levels (i.e. below a mean Z score
of zero) by 23:00 h and did not climb
back up to average until after 06:00 h.
• these ‘real-job’ speed and accuracy
measures are only above average
between 07:00 h and 19:00 h, at all
other times efficiency is likely to be
relatively impaired, especially so during
the early hours of the morning

18. Shiftwork & Wellbeing

19. Shiftwork and Safety
v Risk was found to increase in an
approximately linear fashion
across the three shifts, showing
an increased risk of 18.3% on
the afternoon shift and of 30.4%
on the night shift, relative to
that on the morning shift, and
this is shown in Figure 2.
v the relative risk of incidents to
be higher on the afternoon shift
than on the morning shift, and
for it to be highest on the night
shift.

20. Shiftwork and Safety
On average, risk was ~6%
higher on the second night,
17% higher on the third night
and 36% higher on the fourth
night.
On average, there was some
evidence that risk did increase
over successive morning/day
shifts, but this increase was
substantially smaller than that
over successive night shifts

21. Shiftwork and Safety
• This figure showed that apart from a
slightly heightened risk from the
second to the fifth hour, risk
increased in an approximately
exponential fashion with time on
shift such that in the twelfth hour it
was more than double that during
the first 8 h.
• The trend for hours on duty shown in
Figure 6 does not control for the
influence of breaks during a duty
period, and indeed one possible
explanation for the decrease in risk
after the fifth hour may be that it
reflects the influence of rest breaks.
It reflects the
influence of rest
breaks.
2X

22. Shiftworks and Health – Malaysian Findings
• The night-shift workers in the present study reported worse sleep
quality compared with non-night-shift workers (Lim, Hoe, Darus et
al., 2019)
• Stratified analysis showed that night-shift work was associated with
higher risk of metabolic syndrome (MetS) among male workers
compared with female workers.
• But, respondents are older (40-60 years) and are from the
manufacturing sector.
• Dissatisfaction due to career development and
opportunities.

23. • How work schedule is affecting the whole aspect
of life is not counted by the workplace.,
• Loads transfer which is not counted when you are
working with inexperienced colleagues
• There are LOTS of procedures to learn,
• Less senior tellers need help
• Senior team members can be bombarded with
questions
• Shorter notice time of shift work changes are not
helpful as well.
Source: Messing, K (2019). Closing the Empathy Gap: Learning about work
from the people who do it. Presentation in Seoul, Korea.
Wellbeing Challenges: Teamwork

24. Source: (Schneider &
Harknett 2019)
https://shift.berkel
ey.edu/its-about-
time-how-work-
schedule-
instability-matters-
for-workers-
families-and-racial-
inequality/
Shortnotice: 2/3rd have
less than two weeks’ notice,
and 1/2 of those get less
than a week’s notice.
Workers’ schedules are
also changed at the last
minute, with 14%
reporting at least one
cancelled shift in the last
month.
Workers’ schedules are also
often changed at the last
minute, 70% reporting at
least one change to the
timing of one of their shifts
in the past month.
25% workers are expected
to work on-call shifts
50% back-to-back closing-
then-opening shifts
separated by less than 11
hours (“clopenings”).
Shiftwork
& QWL

25. Shiftwork & QWL

27. Invisible and not legitimate
• Family problems are created by the precarious and inhuman
work situation but they are not supposed to affect work or
colleagues,
• Scientists who research work/family usually examine office or
professional work,
• All the arrangements and their costs to the parents,
grandparents, neighbours, friends and children remain
invisible,
• Colleagues on the work teams help in many ways – which
become additional load but not necessarily acknowledged.
Source: 1. Lefrançois et al. 2017 Community, Work and Family 20(5).
2. Messing, K (2019). Closing the Empathy Gap: Learning about work from the people who do it. Presentation in Seoul, Korea.

28. As a conclusion

29. Impaired Safety + Productivity = Shiftwork
• Early theorists attributed this to either a build-up of ‘mental fatigue’
over a period of wakefulness or an underlying rhythm in ‘sleepiness’
that was independent of whether people had actually slept. More
recent studies have confirmed that both these factors contribute to
circadian variations in performance.
• These models essentially MAKE ASSUMPTIONS that productivity and
safety are low at night because;
(i) the circadian rhythms in performance are at a low ebb at this
time and
(ii) they remain relatively unadjusted over normal spans of
successive night duties.

30. What are the Solutions?
q Data mining
oAllow work scheduling up to 14-
days in advance – Walmart
(Revenue of US$514.4 billion).
q Laws for Advance Schedule
notice
oThe state of Oregon and the cities
of New York, San Francisco,
Seattle and Philadelphia have all
passed laws forcing businesses to
offer guaranteed hours and
advance notice of schedules
ranging from 72 hours to two full
weeks.
q Change to Work/Rest Patterns
o it would seem that in order to
minimize the overall risk on a
shift system we need to
consider the number of
successive night shifts, the
length of the night shifts and
the provision of breaks within
them.
q For schedules, software is
developed for shift exchanges.

31. The Way Forward
We need more studies on (i) productivity on shift systems that address
the differences in the workforce or work practices for Malaysia and AMS.
(ii) interaction between the type of shift and successive shifts on
Productivity - to determine whether any trends found, hold true for
other work situations. So we understand the productive work
schedule for shift type of work.
(iii) consequences to risk over longer spans of successive night shifts, to
determine whether risk, like productivity, reduced over longer spans
of successive night shifts.
(iv) the reasons for these large disparities between the predictions
made by current models and the objectively determined trends in
risk are unclear, but may reflect on additional, as yet unidentified,
factors that need to be incorporated into the models, and/or the
possibility that risk is not linearly related to alertness and
performance on laboratory tasks.

32. Terima kasih