competency management Archives

Automating competency management: effective, efficient, accurate

Posted on: 23 May 2024

Having the ability to automate your competency management process enhances your workforce scheduling, improving output and safety

When assigning staff to tasks and schedules, understanding their core competencies is essential. As a stark and wholly unfair example, in a transport organisation you wouldn’t assign an accountant to drive a train. Nor would you ask a train driver to look over your accounts. Understanding an individual’s skills, training and experience is essential. It’s essential to the smooth running of your services and the safety of your workers and end users. Competency management is central to this.

Running schedules in a live and constantly evolving environment such as transport is difficult. There’s the basic schedule to adhere to. Then there are events, often beyond your control, which can curtail even the best laid plans. Being able to respond to these unforeseen circumstances swiftly and accurately is the difference between minimising service disruption and lengthy delays or cancelations.

This goes beyond transport, too. In construction, for example, if there is an accident on site or work isn’t carried out to the required standard, it can cause delays and impact the cost of the project.

The most reliable way of minimising such incidents is by having the right people in the right place at the right time. Your competency management framework plays a vital role in this. It achieves this not only by ensuring staff are trained, skilled and experienced, but also by being made transparent and available across your organisation. The link between training, assessment and scheduling needs to be seamless. Information must be available in real-time and events responded to accordingly.

What does real-time competency management look like?

Automation is key here. Let’s take the example of a train driver being assessed. Their ongoing competence is paramount to the smooth and safe running of services. Regular assessments need to be scheduled, conducted and reported on.

Driver A is due for their assessment. The assessor needs to be notified of the need to assess them and they will then go about conducting the assessment. Once the assessment is complete, they will then need to record the outcome of it. If Driver A has passed the assessment, this information needs to be made available to the driver, their management team and the scheduling team. In this scenario, it’s a case of confirming business as usual.

But what if Driver A fails to pass their assessment? In this scenario, further training may be required as remedial action to rectify their error. If the assessor notes Driver A as having failed, there needs to be a swift chain reaction to this. Driver A must be notified, their managers too, plus the scheduling team. Driver A may need to be removed from duty until such a time that they have undertaken the requisite training. This means, therefore, that the training team must be notified, too, with a view to booking Driver A in for training asap.

The scheduling team will then need to arrange to have another driver cover any shifts that they are booked in for. This triggers its own chain of communication, impacting another driver and their ongoing shifts. Regulations around working hours must be factored in and adhered to.

Automating this process makes it more efficient. Information, rather than being siloed by department, can be shared electronically at the point of input. This means that the driver, their managers, the scheduling team and the training department can all act quickly.

How do organisations automate their competency management?

This is a process that Transport for London (TfL) operates through CACI’s Cygnum software. Assessors are assigned to a list of tube drivers who need assessing, they can see their routes and timings and meet drivers at a station that best suits them. The results are recorded instantly and follow-up activities are automatically triggered.

Assessors access a priority list of drivers on the go through Cygnum. They can see where drivers are due or coming up for assessment. This means they can prioritise accordingly. Using the Cygnum Mobile app, assessors can record results on the go, in real time.

Obviously mobile reception can be an issue on sections of the London Underground. Where this is the case, results are stored offline on the app to be uploaded as soon as possible once reception is available again.

With results recorded in or near to real time, TfL’s training and scheduling teams have accurate and up to date information available to them. For the training team, their list of drivers is demand driven, so those drivers who need to receive training most are put to the front of the queue. This minimises frontline absences.

Ongoing training can be enhanced via automation too. Regular checks, from safety briefings to eyesight checks need to be conducted and recorded. Sending reminders and auto-booking people onto courses makes for a smoother process.

Network Rail operates its training management programme through Cygnum. This enables Network Rail to automate vast swathes of its training operation. Mandatory courses are booked in advance, attendance is accurately monitored and results are recorded and shared across the organisation.

The automation of this enables Network Rail to not only keep abreast of its training courses and who needs to attend, but also to inform schedulers of their outcomes. This is essential in keeping the right people in the right place at the right time.

Conclusion

Whilst automation of competency management can be incredibly useful across any transport organisation, it is only as reliable as the data entered into your system. Bringing data together from across your organisation is essential. Where data become siloed, its usefulness is stunted. Creating a single view requires the input of every department.

Automation can make the crucial task of keeping the right people in the right place at the right time more straightforward. It can alert you and your staff of required upcoming training. Assessments can be scheduled well in advance with results logged instantly. Training can be booked when it’s needed, including in a demand-led fashion. Again, making the outcomes of sessions available to the wider business instantly facilitates accurate and timely decision making.

Ultimately, automation of competency management underpins accurate scheduling. Assigning tasks to staff safe in the knowledge that they are the right people to perform such tasks is essential in transport. In any industry with moving parts, being able to make changes in a live environment is also essential. When schedulers and administrators have to manually trawl through records to evidence the changes they wish to make, it wastes valuable time. Being able to instantly understand someone’s suitability for a task, against their core competencies, skills, experience and working patterns, saves time and keeps services moving.

Automation is undoubtedly challenging to achieve, but the results are well worth it.

Technology and its impact on risk in the rail industry

Posted on: 16 May 2024

How technology is enhancing safety for rail workers at organisations like Network Rail and Transport for London (TfL)

Whilst the UK is in the enviable position of having one of the safest rail networks in the world, that’s not to say that things couldn’t be improved upon. Technology is playing a major role in advancing safety standards and enhancing safety for the rail network’s workforce and passengers. This case study looks at how Network Rail and Transport for London (TfL) are utilising CACI’s Cygnum software to support their efforts in managing the training and competency of their workforce.

Beyond the immediate safety of the workforce, enhancements in training and competency management serve to reduce overarching risk. Risk takes on many forms in the rail industry. Mistakes can lead to health and safety incidents; they can also result in service disruption and delayed projects. If staff aren’t appropriately trained, mistakes are more likely to occur. If staff aren’t assessed, there’s no knowledge and reporting on frontline delivery.

Capturing data and appropriately acting upon it is vital to a successful training and competency management framework. Being able to schedule training and assessments effectively and efficiently, whilst also being able to capture outcomes in real-time, helps organisations to maintain core competencies across their workforce and provide opportunities for career progression, an expansion in the available pool of skills and also the opportunity for re-training and mandatory ongoing training where necessary.

Training management

Training management takes many guises within an organisation such as Network Rail, which has a workforce of over 48,000 people. From mandatory ongoing training courses to more advanced, career progressing initiatives, Network Rail caters for its workforce with the provision of thousands of courses every year across 11 national training centres.

Running this process efficiently is paramount in achieving the desired training outcomes. Where manual processes are involved in inviting staff to mandatory sessions and checking that they have attended, mistakes inevitably creep in. This can result in staff attending the wrong courses, being sent to the wrong location or not attending.

Implementing a technology system can help to alleviate such issues, with automated checking of course prerequisites, auto-booking of staff to mandatory courses at defined intervals, auto-logging attendance on the day (plus any results that are required) and creating efficiency and consistency across the process. This leaves the more manual aspects to exceptions and more complex arrangements.

Furthermore, a robust training management programme enables organisations to diversify and enhance the range of skills available to them within their existing workforce. If places on courses are free, then they can be offered out to the wider workforce. This improves efficiency by helping to keep courses full. Making best use of available training resources by ensuring that courses are run to capacity and any vacant spaces are offered to interested employees who would benefit from the training opportunity, continuously enhances the core competencies and career opportunities available to your workforce.

Each training course costs money to run, from the trainer, the time taken by the employee and the room and facilities used. Finding a way of maximising the results of this expenditure is crucial. With improved visibility of class utilisation via Cygnum, Network Rail can offer out vacant course places to the wider rail industry, thereby supporting other organisations in their training needs and helping to support the wider safety standards of the rail industry.

Competency management

Closely linked to training is competency management. TfL utilises Cygnum to support the ongoing competency management of its 4,500+ Underground drivers. At a basic level, competency management is ensuring that staff are competent to perform their roles. For example that they are appropriately trained and qualified for the tasks they are undertaking. Beyond that, competency management helps organisations to understand the skills at their disposal across their workforce.

It also ties into training where mandatory ongoing training is required to maintain competence for a role. For train drivers, this includes basic aspects such as eyesight checks. It also establishes the triggering of mandatory training where mistakes have been made out in the field. Similarly to Network Rail, TfL can then schedule training at the point of a result being logged. This ensures that all drivers have access to relevant and necessary training to ensure ongoing competence.

To further have assurance on driver competency, TfL carries out ‘on the job’ staff assessments. These are scheduled by Cygnum automatically based on business rules and the driver’s duty rota. Both the assessor and driver are notified instantly. This reduces the manual effort in arranging assessments, making the process more efficient.

When an assessor assesses a driver, they can capture the outcomes on their mobile device via Cygnum’s mobile app, Cygnum Mobile. Results are uploaded to the Cygnum database and any follow up activities are automatically triggered as a result. Cygnum Mobile also includes offline data capture capability, to mitigate poor mobile reception when operating underground.

Improving workforce safety and reducing risk

By running robust training and competency management programmes, Network Rail and TfL are better positioned to monitor the skills of their workforce and ensure that appropriately trained and competent personnel are operating their services. This further helps them to monitor the safety of their networks by ensuring that all operators are compliant with industry safety standards.

Of course, no system can eradicate human error, but technology can help in prioritising workforce safety whilst at the same time encouraging career progression and the expansion of available skills within the workforce. Where the workforce is trained and regularly assessed, incidents can be kept to a minimum and when they do occur, understanding why is made easier. This is because the competencies, training, skills and experience of those involved can be quickly understood in reporting on incidents.

Having a complete picture of skills, experience and the results of regular assessments also supports administrative and scheduling staff and accurately and fairly assigning tasks to appropriate members of the workforce. Having a central view of core competencies set against bespoke business rules facilitates a degree of automation in scheduling, which reduces manual effort, improves accuracy and makes it easier to handle exceptions. Creating a central view of staff skills enhances workforce safety and reduces risk, since it reduces the likelihood of staff being assigned to tasks to which they’re not suitable for.

For more information on Cygnum, please visit: https://www.caci.co.uk/software/cygnum/

Cygnum from CACI used by TfL as competency management solution for London Underground drivers

Posted on: 10 May 2023

CACI is pleased to announce that its Cygnum solution is now being used by Transport for London (TfL) to support the competency management process for its 4,500 London Underground drivers.

Cygnum is designed to assist organisations in all aspects of their workforce management, from scheduling and competency management, through to training and recruitment, helping to keep appropriately skilled, experienced and qualified staff performing tasks. Cygnum will assist TfL in gaining a holistic view of the ongoing competencies of its London Underground drivers.

“We’re delighted that TfL has chosen our Cygnum software to underpin the ongoing competency management of its tube drivers,” says Ollie Watson, Group Business Development Director at CACI. “We’re looking forward to continuing to work closely with TfL on its Cygnum solution to help ensure that its competency management programme is run efficiently and effectively into the future.”

For more information on Cygnum and how it supports businesses, please visit https://www.caci.co.uk/software/cygnum/

Effective workforce management – training and competency management

Posted on: 17 April 2023

Ongoing training and competency management efforts are vital for organisations in maintaining effective service delivery. Keeping staff competent, via mandatory ongoing training for their role, is often a regulatory issue. Offering staff opportunities to expand upon their core competencies makes the same process beneficial to the development of your workforce.

Whilst training and competency management are closely linked, there are some differences.

Training management

Certain training courses are mandatory in most professional environments. For example, offices require a number of trained first aiders and fire wardens. Such training needs refreshing every three years, so having staff with those competencies in the office requires them to be trained on an ongoing basis.

In more public facing and safety critical roles, ongoing mandatory training in aspects of health and safety is required. Not fulfilling these training obligations leaves firms at risk of staff carrying out their tasks improperly.

Keeping on top of these courses is vital. A central system helps firms to set reminders and book in mandatory courses for their employees. Such a system can also help to keep track of attendance, ensuring that courses have been attended and completed.

Using the same system, organisations can also make their training courses open to their employees for them to book onto when it suits them. This makes your training management more flexible and opens up training opportunities to employees who may find them interesting. By offering the opportunity to expand on their professional interests, training management can help with staff morale and career development.

If you can train and bolster the competencies of your existing workforce, it makes life easier if you need to move staff around tasks to keep project and service delivery on track during times of strain.

Running training courses also incurs an expense. It makes sense to monitor attendances and interest in certain courses, so that you can offer tailored and more relevant courses to your workforce. Where spaces are likely to be free in arranged courses, having robust oversight of this enables you to open course registration within your organisation, or even sell spaces to other industry firms, the employees of which also need to attend such a course.

Competency management

Competency management is closely, even inextricably, linked to training management. Where it differs in the first instance is in the recruitment of new employees. If an employee says they have the necessary qualifications to fulfil the role for which you are employing them, competency management is the simple act of ensuring that they are indeed appropriately qualified.

For example, if you’re employing someone to do a driving job, it’s prudent to check that they have a driving licence. Where competency management would link with training management in such a scenario would be if you need that employee to further their driving credentials at a point in the future. So, for example, you may need to enhance their competency and send them on an advanced driving course.

Ongoing training plays a crucial role in competency management, too. As mentioned above, in many industries ongoing training is mandatory. This keeps your workforce competent for the tasks that you need it to be competent for.

Where competency management extends this is by linking to performance. If a certain employee is involved in a certain number of similar incidents, it can be a good idea to try and find out why and assign them to an appropriate training course. This means that you are taking reasonable steps to provision for both employee and customer safety, whilst also keeping your services running smoothly.

Assessing staff competencies on an ongoing basis, therefore, is crucial. In the same way that you would schedule an employee, assessors need to be scheduled to staff members and teams to periodically check their work. On the rail network, for example, such assessments take the form of an assessor conducting a ride along with a train driver to check that they are carrying out their job appropriately.

If all is well, this can be logged instantly in a central system. Similarly, if errors are detected, these can be logged instantly, with any follow-up tasks, such as another assessment or the requirement for further training, being actioned straightaway. This helps to ensure that the competencies of your staff are covered, whilst linking directly to your training management for mandatory and remedial courses.

Maintaining a central database of your workforce and its competencies fundamentally helps you to ensure that your have the right people performing the right tasks. A robust competency management framework benefits your scheduling efforts, too, since your administrative teams responsible for scheduling can assign tasks with peace of mind that those employees being rostered are appropriately qualified and/or experienced for the role to which they are being assigned.

Furthermore, a central competency management system feeds into other areas of your organisation. In being able to swiftly and accurately assess the strengths and weaknesses of your workforce, you can make informed decisions in other areas such as recruitment.

Training management and competency management for your entire organisation

The benefits of having robust training and competency management across your organisation are clear. Fulfilling mandatory ongoing training obligations whilst at the same time opening up opportunities across your workforce to expand upon their competencies is hugely beneficial.

Keeping staff competent is one thing but offering career progression boosts morale and helps to keep staff working for your organisation rather than having to seek opportunities elsewhere.

Ultimately, your workforce is your point of project and service delivery. Maintaining and understanding the array of skills and experiences drives effective and efficient delivery. Plugging this into other areas of your business, such as scheduling, enables your organisation to be agile in the face of short-term changes and responsive in remedying medium and longer term issues which are more easily identified with a bird’s eye view of your workforce.

Getting your training and competency management frameworks to dovetail will help drive understanding of your workforce, which in turn will help effective and efficient deployment to projects and services.

CACI has recently published a whitepaper, Effective workforce management to improve outcomes across your business which explores this topic in more detail. You can download your free copy here.

The importance of communication in rail safety

Posted on: 24 February 2023

A collision between a train and tractor in Kisby highlights the importance of training, briefing and communicating with all workers and operators to enhance rail safety.

Setting out safety guidelines and effectively communicating them with the workforce is paramount to creating a safe and accountable working environment. If staff aren’t briefed on safety procedures and processes whilst conducting their work, then mistakes are likely to happen. This was brought into focus on 19 August 2021 when a freight train collided with agricultural machinery being towed by a tractor at 04:10. The incident happened at Kisby, at a user worked crossing. The train was travelling at 66mph. So, how did this happen?

According to the report released in October 2022 by RAIB (Rail Accident Investigation Branch), the accident occurred because the driver of the tractor didn’t telephone the signal operator to check that it was okay to cross. Rather, they assumed that it was safe to look at the tracks to determine whether or not a train was approaching. With the train travelling at such speed, they didn’t see it, resulting in the collision.

Firstly, the incident could have been significantly worse. The train driver sustained minor injuries in the collision, with the driver of the tractor uninjured. From a collateral perspective, the locomotive and one wagon derailed, whilst the rail infrastructure sustained significant damage.

The cost of repairing the infrastructure, whilst not noted in the RAIB report, will have been significant, whilst there’s also the time the section of rail will have been out of action for to take into consideration. The stretch of line of was out of action for four days whilst the train was recovered and the tracks were repaired. This will have resulted in delayed and cancelled services.

A Class 66 locomotive, the type of locomotive involved in the accident here, has a value of around £1.5m. This is based on GBRf spending £50m on a fleet of 37 such locomotives in 2014. It’s fair to assume the repair bill won’t have been cheap.

The short-term planning, to assign engineers at short notice to track repairs, will have taken them away from other projects on the rail, resulting in other projects being affected by this incident. This, too, will have had cost implications, as well as creating scheduling issues for engineering workers, since their rosters will have had to be re-jigged.

It’s clear that the cost, time and resource implications of this incident were vast. That’s before taking into consideration just how much worse the incident could have been.

In its report, RAIB notes that the driver of the tractor wasn’t aware of the requirement to phone the signal operator to check it was safe to cross. They had not been briefed. RAIB concludes that this is most likely a result of the land owner on either side of the crossing failing to brief users of the crossing in a way which resulted in its correct use. Rail staff were unaware of this until shortly before the incident.

So, significant upheaval, in terms of time and cost, was created because of a simple lack of communication and safety briefings. How can such a situation be avoided?

Having the ability to evidence that training has been delivered, briefings have been given and that communication is recorded, is a major step in the right direction. The RAIB report notes that they were unable to find evidence of any call from the tractor driver to the signal operator, nor that the tractor driver had been briefed on the need to do so. Creating an evidence trail of such activities enables organisations to determine where failings have occurred and rectify them, preferably before an accident happens.

The technology exists to underpin such processes. Keeping a robust record of training and briefings can help to ensure that incidents such as this are avoided. And they are a lot cheaper than repairing a Class 66 locomotive.

Complete workforce management solutions can support your training, competency management, recruitment and scheduling. This helps organisations to keep a complete audit trail of activities, ensuring that tasks, such as safety briefings, are conducted. Human error, however, is inevitable, so they can also assist in the short-term rescheduling of staff to emergency activities such as track repair in the wake of such incidents.

Operating the UK’s rail infrastructure is a complex process which requires the monitoring of several moving and independent parts, as this incident highlights. It involves everyone from land owners to rail operators and anyone who needs to cross the tracks. Keeping tabs on the communication with all parties is difficult. Having a system in place to record communications and aspects such as safety briefing enables operators to keep track of who needs to know what and when.

The cost of not having such a system in place can run beyond the financial. The incident at Kisby could easily have been a fatal one. Is it acceptable that such an avoidable incident occurred through simple ignorance of the required process for safely crossing a railway track? The process can be managed and alerts can be created to ensure that everyone receives the briefings they need to receive. The cost of not doing this can be far greater than the cost of implementing the software that helps to avoid such incidents.

For more information on CACI’s Cygnum software, which helps organisations to gain a holistic view of their workforce and processes, please visit: caci.co.uk/cygnum

How competency management can underpin your workforce safety efforts

Posted on: 4 November 2021

Competency management may sound like a basic construct in the world of safety-critical work. Employees are hired, they prove that they are appropriately trained and qualified for their role and off you go. Being qualified and competent at the commencement of a role is only one aspect of competency management; a robust framework is required to ensure that all staff receive ongoing support, assessments, training and guidance for their tasks. Complying with safety protocols depends upon it.

Understanding your workforce

Having a central record and database of your workforce enables you to keep track of who is competent at what. In times of strain, for example where there might be a number of absentees at short notice (something we’ve seen regularly during the Covid pandemic with people having to self-isolate), it is crucial that you can be nimble in assigning tasks across your workforce to keep services running and projects on track.

A single view of competencies required for tasks and competencies across your workforce facilitates flexible decision making. Staff can be reassigned across your organisation, safe in the knowledge that they are appropriately skilled and competent for the task at hand, whilst remaining compliant with health and safety regulations applicable to the organisation. An easily accessible record of hours staff have worked, for example, must be maintained. Fatigue is a major cause of accidents in the rail sector and can affect staff competencies to perform their tasks. Jobs should not be allocated to staff when they have not had the required amount of rest or they will exceed a safe number of hours to work.

Central record keeping is also useful for identifying skills gaps. Where such gaps are identified, this can trigger a workflow regarding training of staff in your existing workforce and can be linked to your organisation’s recruitment efforts. This further helps to ensure that your workforce has adequate competencies to fulfil the tasks across your organisation.

Safety first

In safety critical environments, competency management can be particularly important in order to comply with safety regulations. It is vital that your workforce is regularly assessed and observed, and that where ongoing training for a role is required, it is delivered, attended and passed.

For example first aider certificates last for three years, although the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) recommend that refresher training is conducted annually. Most working environments require the presence of trained first aiders, so it is important that administrators ensure that there are sufficiently competent personnel to perform the role.

In more safety intensive environments, for example trackside work on the rail network, it is vital that all members of the workforce receive appropriate safety training and briefings to understand their equipment and environment on an ongoing basis.

Ensuring that safety briefings are delivered is crucial and then, when incidents do occur, so is the recording of them, including near misses. With a log of all activities, from briefings to incidents, it makes it much easier to gain a full view of workforce safety and to understand why incidents have occurred. This can then trigger follow-up activities such as observations, assessments and the implementation of remedial training where necessary.

Upskilling your workforce’s competencies

Having a central log of information also makes life easier for your workforce to understand their training and assessment obligations, whilst also opening up and suggesting new training opportunities to them. This helps them with their career development and helps you with broadening the competencies available to you across your organisation.

Ongoing training is a prerequisite in some roles, so using a supporting competency management software tool can help you with auto-allocation of mandatory courses and sending notifications to staff members of training opportunities relevant to them.

Where potential skills gaps are identified, you can recommend relevant courses to your workforce to encourage them to broaden their competencies, making your workforce more flexible and agile in the face of unforeseen shortfalls in staff numbers. This feeds directly into responding to short-term incidents such as self-isolation arising from Covid by equipping you with the knowledge of your workforce that facilitates quick fixes where they are necessary.

A bird’s eye view

With all competencies across your workforce logged, it is much easier to allocate relevant tasks to people in a timely and even automated fashion. A bird’s eye view of your entire workforce makes decision making much easier.

The deployment of the correct technology is crucial to this. Moving away from manually intensive processes such as spreadsheets and phone calls, to having all the relevant information made available to the relevant decision makers in an automated fashion creates great efficiencies in your competency management processes, making it simple to understand who is competent at what.

This carries over benefits to your scheduling, training and, crucially, safety protocols. It’s one thing having appropriately competent staff members when they join your organisation, but updating and upskilling their core competencies keeps your entire organisation on track in a more harmonious manner.

Having a central log of all activities and incidents also makes it much easier to schedule the necessary assessments and observations of your workforce. This central log also makes it easier to identify trends and understand why incidents occur.

Ultimately, keeping your workforce appropriately trained and competent for the tasks which they are assigned to undertake carries huge benefits to your safety efforts. If staff are being assigned to tasks for which they are not appropriately competent, accidents are more likely to occur. Having a clear evidence base and bird’s eye view of your entire workforce helps to comply with safety protocols and keep your projects moving.

For a more detailed look at improving workforce safety across the UK’s rail network, please take a look at our free white paper on the topic.

Effectively managing your fatigue management process

Posted on: 26 August 2021

Fatigue management protocols are commonplace in labour intensive industries which require prolonged periods of physical or mental exertion. If you’ve got engineers or drivers keeping services moving, their working hours need to be carefully monitored in order to ensure that they don’t become fatigued, thereby impairing their ability to perform to the best of their abilities. Providing appropriate rest breaks during shifts and ensuring that they get enough time to rest in between is paramount. So, how can management teams effectively manage this process and ensure that workers are getting enough rest and adhering to your company’s fatigue management protocols?

The role of management

The role of management is fundamental to ensuring that fatigue management procedures are in place, first and foremost. There are usually industry standard guidelines depending upon your sector, for example the number of hours a train driver can consecutively drive for, or be on a shift for, is closely monitored to best ensure that they are in good condition to drive.

More broadly, where safety critical work is being conducted, there is a requirement that there be a 12-hour break between one shift ending and the next one beginning.

Putting these procedures in place is one thing. Enforcing them, however, is another.

The role of technology

Technology can make the process of establishing and adhering to fatigue management protocols much easier for management teams. If your workforce can sign into and out of shifts via their mobile device, then real-time, archivable records can be kept with notifications established where infringements occur.

This enables management teams to better understand the shifts undertaken by the workforce and to take action where required.

Furthermore, by linking your fatigue management protocols to your workforce management structure, you can understand the circumstances of each worker to better combat fatigue. For example, you could link a team member’s domestic address to their shifts, better understanding their travel commitments to get to and from the location of work.

This may not sound important, but Renown Consultants were fined £450,000 by The Office of Road and Rail, with £300,000 in costs, after two of its workers were killed in a road traffic accident on the way home from a shift. Fatigue management protocols had not been adhered to and the two workers had to travel a significant enough distance home for this to prove fatal.

A holistic view

Understanding your workforce and the shift patterns of your workers is crucial to implementing an effective and robust fatigue management framework. Deploying all the information available to you and considering all the aspects will also help in implementing and maintaining your protocols.

Setting shift patterns and rosters is one thing, but then monitoring how they are conducted is another. Receiving real-time data from out in the field gives you a plethora of information.

Not only will it reveal how many hours are being worked, but it will also offer performance indicators where projects are concerned. For example, a set number of hours will be assigned to complete a given task – if this timeline is not met, understanding why is important.

Your fatigue management protocols can plug in to and interact with the rest of your processes in this way, which can help in revealing strengths and weaknesses in your processes to inform other decisions. You will also be able to identify where work is unlikely to be completed within the allocated time, in advance. All the while, you will be able to enhance the safety of your workforce.

Cutting corners with workforce safety is unacceptable and fatigue management is a central component of that. Understanding your workforce’s shift patterns and linking them to their external circumstances can play a fundamental role in ensuring that you have a robust and manageable fatigue management framework in place.