Year
1993
Abstract
Human beings are diurnal species, normally active by day and asleep by night. Yet over thirty million Americans struggle with work schedules that include an off-normal work effort. The railroads, law enforcement, health services, Department of Defense, factory workers, chemical plants and public services; communications and utility workers must provide some form of around-the-clock effort. Shift work has been around since the advent of recorded history. There has always been a need for some type of offnormal service and assistance. The impact of shift work is replete with tales and factual evidence of an increased personnel error rate; disorders, both personal and family, and of course, increased accident events. In our recent memory, the Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant incident, Union Carbide's explosion in Bhopal, and the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant catastrophe all occurred during off-normal working hours. Yet management overall has done little to correct the productiondriven twelve hour, seven day week shift mentality of the nineteenth century. Most schedules in use today are nothing more than cosmetic variations of the old production schedules. This could be driven by a management consideration of the worker's response to change coupled with a reluctant buy-in of responsibility for the effects of change. Florida Power Corporation has developed for its nuclear security force, a unique work schedule which attempts to employ the sound principles of Orcadian rhythms coupled with a comprehensive training program to counter the problems associated with shift work. The results over the last four years have seen a marked reduction in the generic problems of personnel errors, absenteeism, unscheduled overtime and turnover rates. The results achieved have been unexpectedly positive. Utilization and understanding of this scheduling process for rotational shift work needs to be assessed to determine if the benefits are site specific or provide an expected response to the problems of shift work.