Overcoming Fatigue with Relaxation
In celebration of National Relaxation Day, a day dedicated to the reduction of stress and fatigue in our lives, we would like to focus on another aspect of relaxation that is often overlooked: relaxation within the workplace.
In the past twenty years, the phrase “burnout” has been catapulted into the cultural zeitgeist of most modern workplaces. Burnout is energy depletion or fatigue resulting from chronic workplace stress. The TapRooT® System aims to identify and reduce root causes like burnout, exhaustion, and stress in order to prevent workplace disasters caused by fatigue. Here are a few ways that fatigue can be dangerous, and some techniques we recommend for tackling that threat.
Preventing Fatigue
Modern workplaces are passionate about relieving burnout for their employees, but it can be difficult to know where to start. Passionate and dedicated employees will often pursue their goals by putting in overtime and long hours to reach them. Unfortunately, this makes exhaustion the first reward for hard work, and if the system in place does not support these employees, then the motivation to remain dedicated to their work diminishes very quickly.
The TapRooT® System makes solutions to this problem easily accessible, compiling the research of experts throughout RCA specialties to help companies generate useful ideas. For fatigue, much of the problem typically lies in scheduling. Here are a few ideas from our Corrective Action Helper® Guide:
- Utilize shift work to keep tired employees off of important controls.
- Ensure adequate time off between shifts for rest to avoid accumulating “sleep debt.”
- Set limits on work hours for safety-critical jobs.
- Encourage sleep education so that employees understand the importance of relaxation to reduce fatigue.
The Challenger Disaster
The Challenger disaster was a failed rocket launch resulting in the deaths of its seven crew members, including a young schoolteacher, Christa McAuliffe, as a part of the Teacher in Space Project. Because of McAuliffe’s presence on the crew, thousands of classrooms across the country tuned in to watch the launch, permanently imprinting the tragedy into the minds of America’s children forever.
The Challenger, however, had plenty of safeguards in place to help lessen the danger that came with the rocket launch: the problem lies in the fact that those safeguards were people. If the employees performing checks on the launch had been provided with adequate time for rest between shifts, the disaster could have been prevented.
The NASA engineers were running off of less than two hours of sleep when they were working on the Challenger launch, also focusing on multiple other projects for NASA within the same time frame. According to NASA’s Human Factor Analysis report, shift work and overtime generated the safety issues that caused “catastrophic human errors,” and there was significant pressure within the workplace for the contract workers constructing the launch to take on an unusually high amount of overtime.
Highly dangerous jobs, such as the Challenger rocket launch, have too much at risk to ignore such easily avoided issues as fatigue. A workplace that prioritizes their employees’ time to rest and relax is more than just a kind workplace; it is a safer one. In the instance of the Challenger disaster, lives could have been saved by the prioritization of rest, and by rewarding safety over overwork. From disasters like this, we develop a better understanding of the necessary steps to protect employees from future fatigue-related disasters.
Creating Peace
Relaxation is one of these necessary steps, and one that we can implement in our free time. Creating peaceful moments in our lives is one of the most effective ways to increase our ability to do work both safely and efficiently.
To learn more about protecting the workplace from the dangers of exhaustion, check out our Fatigue and Human Error session at the 2025 Global TapRooT® Summit.
To learn more about TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis, check out our courses.
