Melissa Larson Senior Editor Y ou've carefully crafted a quality-control plan, instituted written work procedures, and tested out the plan. It works fine among your plant's day workers. Employees' bodies are telling them it's time to sleep, just when they need to be alert. Shiftworkers tend to interact less, communicate less, and double-check less during this time. Quality managers and human-performance specialists would do well to focus on this factor.
Body temperature drops, along with alertness.
Analyze the critical jobs in each shift and plan accordingly. The answers help workers sort the critical jobs from those not so critical, and help identify which tasks in the procedure should be double-checked. But more and more night-shift workers operate technically demanding machinery, use computers, and assemble complicated parts. McBride cited instances in which management, with the cooperation of shift workers, reorganized shifts so that the most demanding or critical work was limited to the day shift. Some companies schedule plant maintenance, materials-handling, and cleanup tasks for the third shift, with more demanding production and assembly activities reserved for the first two shifts.