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.
