Improving our understanding of how working time information is recorded and used in rail.
Project number:
2022-SSH-001
Ways to measure and monitor the actual hours worked more accurately
'This moves us closer to capturing ‘actual hours’ accurately and improving our fatigue risk management work.'
The challenge
Fatigue was a factor in 21% of high-risk rail safety events in Britain. Shift work patterns in rail and other transport industries often require work to be scheduled for times outside a normal routine. These shift patterns can conflict with circadian rhythms and sleep drives, which make fatigue risk more likely and more severe.
Much work has gone into planning rosters which meet fatigue risk guidelines. However, these rosters cannot always account for ‘on-the-day’ changes, so planned rosters often differ from actual work hours. This increases the potential for employees to experience unexpected fatigue risk. Some roster systems are not able to compare planned versus actual hours. This may contribute to slow response times when shifts need last-minute changes, or to fatigue risk being masked when roster adjustments are not made to reflect the actual hours of work.
The industry wanted to understand these issues in more detail.
What we did
RSSB did a literature review to understand how actual hours are tracked and used across rail and other transport industries. Interviews were held with rail staff about the process of recording actual hours.
Eighteen papers were identified for review. They cover a range of types of evidence, including systematic reviews, field studies, experimental studies, surveys, and literature reviews.
The interviews revealed common themes between operating companies around their hours recording process. Potential areas for inaccuracies were identified for further research.
Benefits delivered
The interim report summarises the information found on recording and using actual work hours data. It explains how these processes can be better aligned with current good practice.
The report identified areas where organisations vary in their hours recording process, for example, in their reporting process and threshold for alerts.
This report shares parts of the systems that users most liked and disliked by users and may help companies choose new hours recording systems.
Areas for future research have been identified. These include the perspective of frontline workers or supervisors, and research into the difference between contracted hours and worked hours.