The Phenomenology and Experience of Fatigue within the Australian Defence Workforce

Introduction: Increasing domestic commitments (bushfire, flood, storm, and COVID responses), coupled with training and operations, have served to highlight the importance of effective fatigue risk management within the Australian Defense workforce. To assess the utility of an enterprise approach to fatigue management, a qualitative investigation was undertaken to understand the phenomenon of Defense workforce fatigue.

Methods: Thirteen focus groups were conducted across Australian Defense Groups and Services using the Scenario Invention Task Technique (SITT). This resulted in a sample size of 64 Defense personnel, 75% male, including 12.5% Navy, 36% Army, 39% Air Force and 12.5% Australian Public Servants. Within the SITT methodology, participants created scenarios to unpack the nature of fatigue in Defense. Some of these were hypothetical, and some were real- life scenarios, but all were drawn from lived experiences. Data analysis adopted a combination of conventional context analysis and Thematic Networks Analysis. Analysis was performed inductively in multiple rounds of iterative coding. This means that categories of analysis were not predefined beforehand and instead emerged as a function of the data analysis. Data saturation was achieved in this study partway through data collection, such that additional participant responses offered no new insights or themes.

Results: The analysis explored participants’ relationship with fatigue, showing the complex and multifaceted ways in which participants perceived and coped with fatigue. This was analyzed across four dimensions of emotional experience, intensity, self-awareness and attempted control. Analysis of these scenarios generated themes as well as key elements and risk factors. Further analysis of these data provided six thematic groupings of feelings states, depicting the live experience of workforce fatigue within Defense; Work and Performance, Cognitive and Mental, Physical and Sensory, Emotional and Affective, Self-worth and Identity, Existential and Moral.

Conclusion: The data collected yielded rich and meaningful insights into the experience, phenomenology, and dynamics of fatigue in Defense. Two overall conclusions can be made from the findings: 1) The feeling states and lived experiences of fatigue in Defense are unique and, hence, require a tailored approach to management. 2) There was a tendency to conflate or confuse short- term risk and safety issues with long-term psychosocial, health and well-being issues. Currently, within the Australian Defense workforce, the term ‘fatigue’ is used to capture a very broad set of feeling states and experiences. For example, fatigue generated from a perceived lack of purpose or meaning from the organization, or the connection between individual capability, fatigue impairment and self-worth and identity. While this ‘all-encompassing’ schema of fatigue might be technically valid, a safety and operationally focused definition of fatigue will enable it to be used within a risk management framework. The study was approved by the Department of Defense and Veterans’ Affairs Human Research Ethics Committee.

 

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No conflict of interest has been declared by the author(s).

Publication History

Article published online:
08 October 2025