When Training Ends, What Changes?

SPEAKER_00 0:02

I just want to give you a scenario. You've recognized that your chef workers need support. You found some budget, and you've brought someone in to educate your workforce. Tick the session was great. People were engaged, they're asking questions. The feedback afterwards is always excellent. Roger's fantastic. He gets it. I feel like he's talking at me, talking to me, not at me. Everyone walks away thinking what they think talking about what they've just learned. Job done, right? Well, maybe not. Because if you and I are still sitting at this table having a coffee, then there's one question that I'm going to ask. What is going to be different in six months' time? Because if the knowledge leaves the room with the educator, you only rented it. So let's talk about that. Because it doesn't have to be this way.

Welcome To A Healthier Shift

SPEAKER_00 1:02

For far too long, we've accepted fatigue, poor sleep, burnout, and declining health as simply part of working in a 24-7 environment. I don't believe they are. Whether you're a shift worker, trying to feel better, or a leader responsible for the people who keep your organisation running around the clock, you're in the right place. Welcome to a healthy shift. I'm Roger Sutherland, and after more than four decades of working 24-7 shifts with Victoria Please, followed by years of studying nutrition, circadian biology, human performance, and working with literally thousands of shift workers, I've made it my mission to change the conversation around shift work. Because healthier people create stronger teams, and stronger teams build better organizations. And it all starts by understanding how to work with your biology and not against it. Let's get into today's episode.

Why Organisations Get Shift Work Wrong

SPEAKER_00 2:06

And welcome back to a healthy shift, the Shift Workers podcast. We've spent the last few episodes talking about what I think is really important conversation for organizations that operate around the clock. And yes, there's an agenda here, and it's Shift Work Champions. And it's important because my mission is to change the way education is delivered and we build internal capability in our 24-7 organizations. Let's face it, we've got it wrong. We're not doing anything about it. We're not educating. So we need to change this. Now we've talked about the hidden cost of not educating your shift workers. We've talked about the fact that we're giving people a roster, but we don't teach them how to work it. And in the last episode, we actually asked who owns shift worker health capability inside your organization. So today I want to talk about what happens when an organization does jump and then decides to educate its people. Because obviously, I strongly believe in workforce education. It's a massive part of what I do. It's 99% of this business. Now I've stood in front of plenty of rooms full of shift workers and seen what happens when people finally understand why they're struggling. Not that they are struggling, not that it's written off to shift work, but why it is they're struggling. I explain the circadian rhythm, and someone suddenly understands why they're falling asleep on the couch at one time of the day, but lying wide awake in bed in the middle of the night. You explain light, and someone starts thinking differently about what they're doing on the drive home after night shift or what they do during the day when they wake up after their day's sleep. I talk about caffeine timing, and then someone realizes that the coffee getting them through the last few hours of their shift is probably the reason why they're struggling to sleep when they get home. I talk about nutrient timing, movement, recovery, and suddenly we're connecting all these things to the reality of working their roster. These moments matter, and I love seeing the light bulbs coming on through the room when people start looking around going, Oh my God, I did not realize this because it's so simple. But if you were sitting across from me and I said, Roger and said to me, Roger, we've done that. We brought someone in last year and the feedback was fantastic. I'd probably say, Epic. That is fantastic. I love this. What happened next?

Great Feedback, Then Nothing Happens

SPEAKER_00 4:41

That's where the conversation becomes a little uncomfortable because most of the time, not much happened next. Everyone went back to work. The presentation might have been emailed around. Someone put some resources on the internet. Maybe people talked about it for a few days or a few weeks. Then work got busy, the next roster came out, people moved teams, new employees started, managers changed, then gradually the energy around that education just disappeared. How many times? Now that's not because the the education wasn't good. It's because awareness and capability are not the same thing. A great education session can absolutely create awareness. And I create lots of awareness. People still today say to me, I'll never forget when you said blah, blah, blah. It can literally change the way people think. It can give them strategies, practical strategies. It can challenge some of the rubbish that's been passed around workplace for decades about shift work. But awareness needs somewhere to go. And that's the piece I think we've missed in workplace education for a long time.

Awareness Is Not Capability

SPEAKER_00 5:52

We focused enormously on the event. We put on cups of tea and chats and fruit bowls and who's presenting, when are they coming? How many people are coming? What room are we going to use? How much is it going to cost? Oh my God, how much did it cost? Did everyone enjoy it? What was the feedback? And those are all reasonable questions. But then I think there's another question that we need to be asking. What are we trying to leave behind? Because if the answer is simply, now we want everyone to attend the seminar, then the attendance becomes the outcome. And I don't think that's what we want. I'd rather hear, we want our people to better understand the biological demands of their roster. Love it. We want them to have practical strategies that they can actually use. Yep, I deliver that. From the second they hear them, they can implement them. We want shift worker conversations to continue after the education. Oh, now we're talking. And we want new employees to have access to good information. We want people within our workforce who understand this stuff and can help to keep it alive. Now we're talking. Now we're talking about something completely different. Because now what we're talking about is capability. And this is why I don't like attacking the so-called one and done seminar too aggressively. I strongly believe in the seminar, educating the workforce. Because this would be pretty hypocritical of me considering I deliver them. A seminar can be incredibly valuable to the workplace. For some organizations, it might literally be the very first time anyone has ever sat in their workforce dan and acknowledged just how bloody hard working shifts can be. And that's important. The problem is when we expect that one intervention to carry the entire load.

Why One And Done Fails

SPEAKER_00 7:48

Think about any other capability inside the organization. You wouldn't expect to build a strong safety culture from one safety presentation. You wouldn't expect leadership capability to be transformed because somebody attended a leadership seminar. And you wouldn't expect someone to become highly competitive in a technical skill after hearing about it once. I'm ex-police. For 40 years, every 12 months, I had to go and do a shoot re-qualify every 12 months to maintain that skill. So why would shift work be any different? We're doing it every single day. I only shot however when I pulled it out to do the shooting every 12 months. But I work shifts every single day. We're talking about behaviors that people need to apply repeatedly while navigating, changing rosters, family responsibilities, sleep opportunities, fatigue, and everyday life. They need to take the knowledge and work out how does this apply to me tonight? That's where practical application becomes so important.

Applying Sleep And Fatigue Strategies

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Let's take sleep. I can stand in front of a hundred shift workers and explain sleep until I'm blue in the face. But those hundred people aren't necessarily going home to the same circumstance. One's got young kids, one lives alone, one's got a 45-minute commute, one's working two nights, another's working seven, one rotates rapidly between days and nights, and another works permanent nights. So education gives us the principles. Application helps people to work out how those principles fit their reality. And then we have another problem. What happens after I've gone? Because eventually, obviously, I walk out the door. And that's where I keep coming back to this line. If the knowledge leaves the room with the educator, you only rented it. And I don't want organizations renting shift work knowledge. I want them to learn it and then build

Developing Shift Work Champions

SPEAKER_00 9:42

on it. Imagine if, after educating the workforce, we identified people from within that organization who genuinely want to understand this at a deeper level. Not because management has simply nominated them and said, congratulations, you're our shift work person now. We want people who are genuinely interested, people who understand the roster because they work it, because their colleagues already talked to. Because who want to improve their own health and performance as well. Then we develop them. We deepen their understanding because they want that. We help them to apply the education themselves first because I think that's really important. Now I don't want someone talking to their colleagues about managing night shift when they haven't even tried to apply these principles into their own life. Learn it, apply it, understand where it's difficult, understand that real life doesn't always cooperate with you. Then develop the skills and boundaries to support conversations with colleagues. And I want to emphasize boundaries. A shift work champion is not there to diagnose someone. They're not prescribing sleep protocols. And they're certainly not replacing a doctor, psychologist, dietitian, fatigue manager, safety team, HR, or employee assistment program. That is not their role. What they're doing is to help keep credible shift work education alive inside your workforce. So imagine it's three months after the original education session, and someone is sitting in the break room at two o'clock in the morning saying, I don't know what's going on. I get home just horrendously exhausted. I'll get into bed and then I'm lying there staring at the ceiling, wide awake. And instead of someone replying, yeah, mate, that's night shift, you'll get used to it. Maybe there's someone there that can say, Remember what we learned about light in the circadian rhythm? What are you doing between leaving here and getting into bed? You see, this is a very different conversation. Or a new employee starts and they're hearing all the usual advice from everyone around them. But now there are people within the workforce who can reinforce the evidence-based education they've been given. And that perpetuates into more and more and more people. And this is how knowledge starts to become part of your workplace culture. And this doesn't happen overnight. And I'm not suggesting that you deliver a seminar on Monday, develop a few champions on Tuesday, and suddenly you've transformed an organization by Friday. Because capability needs to be built and it needs to be reviewed and it needs support. And importantly, we need to learn what actually works inside your organization. And that's why I see this as the pathway.

The Pathway To Lasting Change

SPEAKER_00 12:24

We start with workforce education. We give everyone a common foundation. Then practical application. How does this fit the reality of your roster and your workforce? Then we have champion development. Let's develop selected people from within who want to take the understanding further. Then we start building internal capability. And importantly, over the journey, we review, we refine, and we expand. What's working? What isn't? What are the workers telling us? What are the champions seeing? What needs to change? That's a very different from delivering an event and hoping everyone remembers it. And if we're still sitting over that coffee, here's probably the question I'd leave you with. When you spend money on workforce education, what are you actually buying? Are you buying an hour? Are you buying a presentation? Are you buying positive feedback forms? Or are you using education as the first step towards building something that remains inside the organization? Because I think we need to change the way we measure the success of workplace education. It shouldn't only be, did people enjoy the session? Of course I want people to enjoy it, but I'd rather know what happens after that. Are people still talking about it? Are they applying anything? Has their understanding changed? Are new employers getting the good information from good people? Is the organization becoming better equipped to support the people working through that biological night? What's still there six months later? And that's the question. Because the real value of good workplace education isn't only what people know when they walk out of the room, it's what remains in the organization after the educator has left. And that's exactly why I've created the Shift Work Champions Enterprise Framework. Workforce education is an important starting point, but the framework is designed to go further from education and practical application through to champion development and sustainable internal shift work capability.

Executive Brief And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 14:35

So if you are responsible for a 24-7 workforce and this has got you thinking about what happens after your own workplace education initiatives, I've put together an updated Shift Work Champions executive brief. And the link to learn more and to download the executive brief is in the show notes. I highly encourage you to download it, put it up the line, or just have a read if you're a leader and see where this approach could actually work within your organization. Because there is a big difference between delivering shift work education and building shift work capability. And if the knowledge leaves the room with the educator, you only rented it. And it doesn't have to be this way. Share it with a colleague, a manager, a friend, a leader, or someone who has the opportunity to improve the lives of people working in a 24-7 environment. Because real change starts with awareness. And awareness changes conversations. And conversations change organizations. And organizations change lives. So thank you for spending this time with me. And until next time, I want you to remember this. It doesn't have to be this way. Take care of yourself and take care of each other.