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Shift work can be brutal, but it doesn't have to be. Welcome to a healthy shift. My name is Roger Sutherland, certified nutritionist, veteran law enforcement officer, and 24-7 shift worker for almost four decades. Through this podcast, I aim to educate shift workers using evidence-based methods to not only survive the rigors of shift work, but thrive. My goal is to empower shift workers to improve their health and well-being so they have more energy to do the things they love. Enjoy today's show. And welcome back to another episode of A Healthy Shift. Now, today I want to speak to a very specific audience because if you're an executive leader or a HR professional, someone that works in people and culture, a work health and safety manager, or if you are someone who's responsible for leading a workforce that operates around the clock, then this episode is for you. And if you aren't one of those and you are just one of my truly valued listeners, can you bring this episode awareness to your leaders? Bring it up and let's have a conversation around this because I want to ask you a simple question. Who is actually looking after the biology of your shift working workforce? Not the roster, not payroll, not compliance, not the health and safety reps, not their annual

Why Shift Work Biology Matters<br>

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well-being week, their biology. Because whether your organization runs a hospital, an emergency service, a manufacturing plant, a transport network, a mine, a warehouse, your business depends on the people working against their biological clock. And this is where many organizations today seriously have a massive blind spot. And we need to look at this and we need to look at it hard because we now know that over 20%, one in five people are now shift working in society. And this is significant. We've accepted shift work as part of modern life. You put that Amazon order in, you want it yesterday. We have policies around it. We pay a shift allowance. We monitor fatigue. Well, some industries monitor fatigue. Whether they do it well or not is very subjective. But there's very few organizations that are educating their people on how to reduce the biological impact of shift work. And this is literally costing organizations a lot more than what they even realize. And the evidence today has never been clearer. This podcast has been recorded in July. In fact, July the 4th, 2026. We have significant evidence around today. Long-term night shift and rotating shift work are associated with increased risks of cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders, gastrointestinal disease, impaired mental health, certain cancers, reduced cognitive performance, and premature mortality. That's a lot. Think about it. In fact, the World Health Organization has classified night shift work that disrupts the code in rhythms as a probable carcinogenic, as probably carcinogenic. So have a think about that. Just think for a moment. Because if another workplace exposure in anything that you did in your work, if your work health and safety rep was walking around and there was something in your workplace that exposed those kinds of risks, they would be lining up to control the risk. And they would. It would become a shutdown. We've got to control this, we've got to fix this, we've got to do something about it. And yet every single night, millions, and I mean millions of people, almost one in five, go to work having received little or no education about how to protect themselves. Instead, we just give them the book, we tell them to go to work, and we tell them to simply cope. We expect them to work through fatigue. We're asking them to make critical decisions. We're telling them to stay productive, remain healthy, without ever teaching them how. They turn up, and in fact, a lot of workplace strategies and practices that are put in place, by the time the night shift gets in, the cakes are gone. All there is is crumbs left on the table. They've missed the meeting. They were told that the meeting was on, but they're working night shifts, so they can't be there. So what are we going to do? And how can we go about it? How do we get them to thrive? So let's move beyond the health for a moment. Because we need to move beyond this well-being. It's not just about well-being. This is literally about operational performance because fatigue is actually affecting decision making. It affects reaction time, communication, memory, emotional regulation, problem solving, mental health. Every one of these factors directly influences workplace safety, customer outcomes, and productivity. Now, fatigue just doesn't increase the risk of injury. It actually increases the likelihood of mistakes. Rework, equipment damage, near misses. We now have psychological injury as well. Absenteeism, psychosocial, presenteeism, staff turnover. How many, if you think about it, in an organization, how much staff turnover is there for the night shift crews now? Now these are not employee problems, I can tell you now, because they just come in, do it for a bit, nah, can't do this, walk out. But what they are is they become an organizational risk. And the question isn't whether fatigue exists in your workplace, because I can guarantee to you, if you're running a 24-7 environment, it absolutely does. The question is, how are you managing it? And are you managing

The Health Evidence And WHS Blind Spot<br>

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it effectively? And here is where I believe that organizations need to think differently. And I have come up with a strategy because I get asked all the time, yeah, that's great, Rog, but how? You know, and I I go into workplaces and I run a keynote, and that isn't enough. Now we already understand the value of having workplace champions. And I've looked at this and I've thought, hang on, many organizations have got safety champions, health and safety reps, mental health champions, well-being champions, we have culture champions, change champions, people who influence behavior from within champions, people who support their colleagues champions, people who reinforce good practice every single day, champions, inclusivity champions. So much money is poured into inclusivity, and these programs work because they create an ownership of that area inside the workforce. So why don't we have shift work champions? Shift work champions. Why are we not identifying trusted members of our workforce on shift and giving them evidence-based education around shift work? I want you to imagine for a minute. You've got different crews, different teams rotating through. Imagine having people across your organization who understand circadian rhythms, who know why light exposure matters, who understand sleep, how to get to sleep, how to work with it, what to do, what not to do, being able to hedge off certain conversations in the workplace around medication. Who can explain why nutrient deficiencies and influences and how it influences performance? Who knows how movement supports alertness? Who recognizes the signs of fatigue before someone reaches breaking point? And most importantly, let's imagine those conversations actually happening on the floor. Because you, as a HR rep or an executive decision maker, or manager or leader or whatever, you're not there on the night shift. Your night shift crew's doing that. And you can't just get them in on a day shift and give them a keynote. You've got to give them that from someone who understands, and that's me. But then we need to coach people that are actually on shift during a night shift at three o'clock in the morning. Not six months later in a well-being seminar. No one listens. It doesn't work. They do that, but they need consolidated information. And this is where the real change begins to happen within a workplace. They get support in real time from people your workforce already knows and trusts. People that you've identified, this person's good. They know what they're doing, they've got the support of their peers. And this is exactly why I have created the Shift Work Champion program. Now, I've spent 40 years working shifts in the front line with Victoria Police. And I experienced many challenges myself. I know what it feels like to work nights, to miss family events, to sleep when the rest of the world is awake, to make important decisions while chronically fatigued. But lived experience alone is not enough. So I returned to study. And I've combined coaching over the last seven years with years of study in continual study around nutrition, chronobiology, circadian health, and evidence-based strategies that help to reduce the biological impact of shift work. And today I'm working with organizations to educate both leaders and frontline workers. I will take your education off you and run it for you. And then you can literally, in your control register, write down what you've done. You've employed a healthy shift to manage your shift work education. Evidence-based. And this is what I'm doing today. I'm working with organizations to bring this to life. It's one of the most exciting initiatives that I have come up with and are doing now with organizations, and that is training shift work champions. These aren't managers, they're just another layer of leadership within the workplace. Now I have coached hundreds

Fatigue As Operational Risk<br>

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of people over the last seven years, and those people are now working in workplaces and thriving. I've had paramedics, nurses, uh, police, um, all kinds of um sorry, nurses, police, paramedics, basically frontline health and emergency service stuff. Literally, I've been their last resort. They've been on their knees, absolutely done. And they've come to me. None of them have left. They're all now thriving in their jobs. And that tells you something in itself. All of them. Particularly the ones in policing. They're all working and working well. Thriving because they've been educated in simple practice on how to go about it. Because it is a simple manipulation. They have become respected members of their workforce. And you need to have respected members of your workforce, people who become internal advocates for healthier shift work practices while they're driving around in the truck and having someone says, I cannot sleep on night shift, I take this or I do that. And they say, No, no, you can't do that, or you shouldn't do this, or this is how you go about it. They're leaders having real conversations on shift in real time. They've actually learned practical strategies that they can immediately apply themselves and show the way. They become the trusted support, a source of support for their colleagues. They're the go-to. They're the ones that are asked. Because education spreads, behavior spreads, culture spreads. When you educate one person, you improve one person. But when you educate champions, you actually start to influence your entire workforce. And that's where the return on your investment begins. Healthier workers, better decisions, fewer fatigue-related incidents, lower absenteeism, reduced presentedism, improved retention, greater resilience, and a much stronger operational performance. Now, this isn't another well-being initiative. I've said that. It's a risk management strategy. It's a workforce capability development. It's investing in your people who keep your organization operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And here's something that I often say to the leaders: we would never hand someone the keys to a specialized piece of equipment without training them first. And yet every day we give them their shift and we ask them to do one of the most biologically demanding work patterns imaginable with almost no education about how to protect themselves. And that just doesn't make sense. I'll be clear: shift work isn't going away, it is growing. Healthcare won't stop. Emergency services are not going away. They're not going to close overnight. Transport won't pause until sunrise. And manufacturing won't suddenly become a nine to five. Because our 24-hour economy depends on our shift working community. Now we can tell shift workers don't do shift work. But you don't get to do anything. That package from Amazon doesn't arrive overnight if there's no shift workers. You don't get to jump on a plane and fly to the other side of the world because there's no one that's working after hours or crossing time zones. The question is whether organizations are prepared to invest in helping those people to perform at their best. And are you? That's the question. Are you? Because the organizations that lead over the next decade simply will not be just writing better rosters. What they're going to do is they're going to build workforces that understand their own biology. They will recognize that education isn't an employee benefit. It's actually an operational advantage. So if you're listening to this today and you are responsible for a 27 workforce, I would love to have a conversation with you. No sales pitch, just a discussion about the challenges that you are seeing in your organization. And I will show you how evidence-based shift work education can become part of

The Shift Work Champion Idea<br>

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your fatigue risk management strategy. This is important today. And what I will do is I will you identify them, I will coach them, I will put them in a community, I will give them the education. And if you think about it, you know, if you're a leader and you're a good leader, you know that this is going to have an on-flow effect. Not only that, but you can tick it off. Because I'm taking care of the education for you. And the people that I've coached have rapidly improved because they start to understand human biology and how the body responds to the data that you're putting into it. And this makes a huge difference. Quickly, you would be very surprised. And then as your new staff come on, because you've got Shift Work Champions in the workplace, they're listening to conversations, observing your staff. You can have your meetings with your champions and get feedback on your crew and who's suffering and who's not and who's doing well. There's no downside for you at all. It's such an investment in your future for your company. So just that discussion about your challenges and how my theory on the shift work champions could make such a difference to you. So if you'd like to learn more about this or my seminars and what I do, workshops, keynotes, and the shift work champion program, just go to the show notes, and in the show notes, you'll see that there's a link seminars there, and you can see the page there. Learn more about that, and there's a link there to download my eBrochia. And then reach out, make an appointment, and let's have a conversation. I can do this anywhere in the world via webinar. We can talk, we can meet. I can come to you if it's within reason here, but I can also come to you as part of the strategy to deliver live and in person so that people can see who it is that's actually delivering that education to them. One thing that I get as feedback from all of my keynotes is oh my God, I just felt like Roger was just talking to me. He gets it. I get that feedback all the time, over and over again, and I can show you. So you'll find that seminar link in the show notes. You can download my information brochure and we can see how I work with organizations to build healthier, safer, and much higher performing 24-7 workplaces. I want to say thanks for listening. If you are an employee, I ask that you bring awareness to this podcast to your management. And if you are a manager, for goodness sake, let's have a conversation. And until next time, remember this shift work may be part of the job, but the damage doesn't have to be. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe so you get notified whenever a new episode is released. It would also be ever so helpful if you could leave a rating and review on the app you're currently listening on. If you want to know more about me or work with me, you can go to ahealthyshift.com. I'll catch you on the next one.