Information is only a keystroke away, but sometimes the problem is not just to find the information you need, but to sort through it, keeping what is really relevant and organizing the data in a user-friendly way. This can easily become a challenging and time consuming task, difficult to complete on a timely way by managers who are often already overworked. If you are trying to gather data on new technologies or evaluate scientific publications to support new policies and procedures, you may also find that your personnel doesn’t have the most appropriate background to sort trough all the available information.

If this is your situation:

• You want a scientific, factual basis for your decisions
• You are expanding into a new environment or type of operation and want to ensure that your policies and practices would be appropriate for the new setting
• You want to educate your managers on a controversial issue regarding best practices for your shiftwork operation

This is how CIRCADIAN® can help you

CIRCADIAN® offers the credibility of an independent expert and provides scientific basis. CIRCADIAN® has a comprehensive shiftwork library, including both articles published in scientific journals and technical reports from the government and other public and private agencies. The library covers multiple topics related to shift work, such as best scheduling practices, work environment, fatigue countermeasures, health and safety problems, HR issues, and others. CIRCADIAN® researches perform periodic literature searches to keep the library up to date.

When performing a literature search for a specific issue, the search typically focuses on articles and reports published in the past decade, but to ensure completeness also includes important earlier publications. In addition, the search includes presentations at scientific meetings and information obtained through personal contacts, such that all previous knowledge on this subject can be pooled and assessed.

Recent literature searches have covered topics as diverse as:

• Driver sleepiness: Causes and Countermeasures
• Maximum number of consecutive work hours and how to schedule breaks when working in emergency situations
• Maximize consecutive work days
• High altitude mining: effects of lack of oxygen on health, performance and safety. Review of countermeasures (scheduling, accommodations, training, etc)

What is wrong with this picture? It’s 4:00 am, and your supervisors and dispatchers are at their control panels under florescent lighting in comfortable, ergonomic chairs -- fulfilling boring, repetitive, but quality-critical tasks for controlling a multi-million dollar operation.  Everything is running at equilibrium, so there’s not much to do besides monitor the continuous processes.  The core body temperature of these managers and heavy equipment operators is decreasing as part of their natural CIRCADIAN® rhythm, so they feel chilly and turn up the heat. That makes the room nice and “toasty,” helping induce drowsiness and sleep.

Meanwhile, they are listening to the constant, hypnotic and soporific hum of the equipment, when Mother Nature is filling their brains full of melatonin – a powerful, natural sleep hormone. Yet we require them to be constantly alert and vigilant at jobs that have best been described as 99.5% boredom and 0.5% sheer terror!

Too often the modern workplace is better engineered to maintain the performance of equipment than human bodies and brains. And yet it is feasible through a systematic process to upgrade the human centered design of most workplaces and ensure environmental triggers of alert vigilant behavior are built into the man-machine interface.

If this is your situation:

• Your employees perform mission-critical or safety-sensitive tasks in monotonous dimly lit rooms
• Control room operators have been found nodding off on the job
• You are redesigning a facility and want to build in features that improve operator performance
• You want to engineer alertness systems into a new plant or green field site
• You have a lawsuit or grievance on working conditions and need expert support

This is how CIRCADIAN® can help you

CIRCADIAN® provides a workplace evaluation and design support team with world-class scientific expertise on human performance and fatigue. We have intimate knowledge of the factors to introduce into extended hours workplaces. Areas of assistance include:

• Evaluating the lighting configuration relative to the critical workstations
• General recommendations and sourcing information for lighting fixtures, lens covers, lighting type and levels of illumination
• Dynamic lighting concepts and vendor sources
• Recommending air flow/equipment configuration
• Recommending air filtration approach/options
• Recommending noise filtration options
• Overall color schemes to maximize alertness levels
• Optimal room temperatures and humidity control
• Recommending audio-visual work environment stimulation
• Flooring options/recommendations
• Techniques and products to reduce screen glare and veiling reflections
• Options and proposals for incorporating aroma stimulation in critical areas
• Recommending ergonomic chair[s] for specific workstation application[s]
• Alertness enhancing administrative controls, policies and procedures
• Options/recommendations for alertness recovery procedures