Ep 12 Fatigue Management expert Dr Adam Fletcher explains industry trends

Brendan: Welcome to Episode 12 of The Australian Health and Safety Podcast. I'm Brendan Torazzi, the host of the show and also the director of OHS.com.au Australia's first health and safety training marketplace. Today I'm joined by Adam Fletcher from Integrated Safety Support. Good day Adam.

Adam: Good day Brendan.

Brendan: How are we on this beautiful afternoon? I'm not sure what it's like in Melbourne but Sydney is having a sunny day for the first time in weeks.

Adam: It's absolutely beautiful here. I have thankfully had just work to do from the office. I'm in shorts and T-shirt. It's delightful.

Brendan: Tell me a little bit about Integrated Safety Support and what do you guys do?

Adam: Integrated Safety Support really was born when I returned from the United States in 2006. I've been working as a research scientist for the US Army in Washington DC specifically looking at sleep and fatigue issues for the US Army. I realized I really wanted to move out of full time research and into solving challenges and problems related to fatigue and workplace performance and safety in government and industry organizations. I founded the company and we have really been focused nearly 13 years now on very fatigue related issues. It's something in the early days with (0:01:48.3) but it's very clear from the workers and the long term clients that we were able to build up but we really have been able to establish a really valuable nation and thankfully get to do really valuable and interesting work all over the world mainly related to human fatigue and keeping people alert and safe and productive in 24 hour work environments.

Brendan: I'm curious about the US Military, do they sleep starve their people? Could you often hear that sort of military, they learn to survive in very little sleep? Is that the case or do they encourage sleep?

Adam: I think it’s something probably a number of people don't fully understand or perhaps hear a few myths about. My people when they're going through their training, certainly basic training and a lot of specialists training they do have short to medium term sleep deprivation periods so that you can learn what happens to you personally when you're put under a period where you're not getting enough sleep but more often than not in operational environments or operational theater they generally do try and optimize the sleep that people are getting unless it's going to be unsafe for people to stop. People think that the military are taking stimulants and other substances to stay awake all the time but generally they're only doing that if it's not going to be safe for people to stop. They usually rather people sleep and maintain high levels of performance.

Brendan: Of course the military is a lot more than just, I guess I had envisage on the call phase actually in some kind of war or something like that but there are lots of parts of the military obviously.

Adam: I think there is a much better understanding, even in the last four or five years I think there’s a much better understanding that optimum performance is much more than staying sufficiently awake and having your eyes open and breathing. I think there is much better understanding of the nuances of situational awareness and other subtle executive performance capabilities and sleep is clearly a major foundation for that. That is understood more so now than it was four or five years ago.

Brendan: When I met you probably it would have been 12 or 13 years ago when we first brought the sleep pods to Australia. We soon discovered that Australia kind of led the world in sleep science. Why do you think that is the case? We’re such a small country in relation to the rest of the world at least in population size, why do you think that Australia has been up there?

Adam: We definitely do punch above our weight. There is no question about that. There's a lot of very high caliber sleep scientists and people in related fields like fatigue in Australia and New Zealand as well actually. I don't really know the answer to that question. There's certainly a lot of links to sleep in modern times in the US. The very discovery of REM sleep in Stanford University in the fifties and then really the sort of expanding view of managing shift work and sleeping in 24 hour work environments started simultaneously in both the US and Europe in the late seventies, early eighties but you're right. In the nineties and noughties and beyond there is definitely a big concentration of people who are respected and considered experts in sleep and fatigue related areas in Australia. I don't really know why. I think perhaps there are some cultural elements. Perhaps there's other explanations but I've been around this field for more than 25 years and I don't have a really clear answer for that.

Brendan: You think like you being Australian and running an Australian business that works with fatigue management and the human factors do you think that helps you when you're doing work overseas?

Adam: I think most places in the world do still really love Australians. We are generally liked in most places around the world.

Brendan: Because we live so far away. We’re not neighbors really to anyone.

Adam: Maybe we're just a distant novelty usually. I definitely think people are interested in spending time with Australians and I think that is a factor. I also generally think and I don't know whether this is just because of our multi-cultural heritage or what it might be but one of the pieces of feedback my team and I get a lot from clients around the world is that we tend to be very respectful and aware of cultural and other factors. Obviously sleep and fatigue issues are fairly hardwired into us as humans in many ways but there is obviously lots of cultural and local factors that can influence people's choices to sleep or not to sleep and things like that. A lot of feedback that we get is that we're very aware and factor in a lot of those very local, cultural and other factors. There seem to be something about our ability to consider those things and not just trying forth our solution on people. That seems to be very appreciated as well. I think that is a factor.

Brendan: Integrated Safety Support, developing technologies to help manage sleep or how do you fit as far as that goes moving forward?

Adam: We're certainly not going to be developing any hardware, monitoring devices be they a wrist worn sleep monitors or cameras mounted on a dashboard or in a cockpit. Those technology solutions are definitely for others. We're building a lot more software based solutions so we create integrations of fatigue modelling software into existing scheduling systems and things like that. Earlier this year we have released our first app which is a free app available on the Apple and Android app store called FatigueSafe. That is a one minute personal self-assessment for fatigue. Certainly we've got a lot of data analytics capabilities. We're building a lot of software app and analysis type solutions but not so much in the hardware space.

Brendan: It’s more around the, I guess when you can sell to clients it's more about analyzing the data they're collecting around sleep and management. Would that be a...

Adam: That is a lot of it and certainly an increasing proportion of what we're focusing on. We still do some more traditional consulting in the sense that we might review fatigue related policies and procedures. We might carry out risk assessments for a particular business or operational site. It's that kind of classic, safety, management consulting but certainly increasingly clients are looking for more technology driven solutions be they algorithms, streamline analysis or reporting capability and things like that. We certainly will be able to do that.

Brendan: I'm seeing like a trend across so many industries where data and data analytics is really where the world is moving and we've got so much data that you've got to be able to analyze it and work out what it actually means.

Adam: I think the majority of organizations now do have huge volumes of data. What we discovered with our clients is that they’re generally still very much data streams in silos but they'll be a silo of safety related information that is separate from the silo of human resources information which will include overtime and absenteeism, sick leave and things like that. That would be separate to industrial things. The data analytics methods that we deploy quite a lot we really start being able to look across all these different data sets. Also scrapping in other external data sets like weather information or public holiday calendars and things like that and actually starting to see where the patterns existed in previously separate streams of data. We’re definitely getting a lot of very deep insights. I mean in some cases very unexpected insights from a lot of those things. It's something that we've had a lot of success in the last few years. It's definitely an area that is exploding quite quickly.

Brendan: What percentage would you say of your practice would be overseas related work versus local work percentage basis? Is it 80% local and 20% overseas?

Adam: In the last couple of years we've been nearly 50% international each year. Where that work has been has differed and actually over the last 10 years has differed from year to year quite a bit. In the last year we've done work in Columbia, Brazil, US, Canada, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, India, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, UK. That is probably the main countries but yes, probably about 50% the last few years.

Brendan: I've got to ask you have you tapped into the government research grants.

Adam: Not directly. When I was an academic full time that was certainly a key source of both funding and credibility. I do hold an adjunct professor role at the University of South Australia and working some research projects particularly supporting early career researches both (0:12:00.1) and junior research staff. To be honest it's actually easier to get money from industry and also government agencies directly rather than through the research channels. As long as you're actually going to deliver and provide the value that your promise which we do we tend to have a lot of quite big government contracts that do roll on year on year out. They’re asking for things. We’re promising them and delivering them and they keep finding things for us to do. The research funds is not really something that we're trying to tap into too much these days.

Brendan: I think I was more thinking around the Export Marketing Development Grants given that you spend so much time overseas.

Adam: We certainly have used the Export Marketing Development Grant and also the R and D program as well. Certainly we're not just doing straight fee for service consulting. We do develop and innovate quite a lot. That often then sunk costs within my business to try and develop things that we believe are going to be of value before we test them and evolve them. We definitely do work with those programs.

Brendan: Are there some major trends in what industry is using your services like aviation obviously is one and you mentioned the military?

Adam: It does change a bit for the geopolitical situation in the world I've observed. There is no question that aviation has been a core focus of ours really ever since the beginning. Sleep and fatigue management is definitely quite strong in aviation globally. Before the GFC we were seeing a really big upturn in activity and focus in the oil and gas and mining industries but that really fell off a cliff in a really major way when the GFC started fighting. Then other industries that you think it would be really relevant with all that trucking and rail and logistics and things like that. They’re generally quite low margin businesses and so our observation is they don't tend to get into things unless they're required to by the regulator. We certainly do do work in those areas. It tends to be a relatively low proportion. For our business at least a lot of it is aviation, aerospace, government agencies which could include emergency services be that ambulance, paramedics, police, fire and things like that, hospitals but also then a spattering of mining, oil and gas, logistics and things like that.

Brendan: Would I be right to assume that most of your work is won by word of mouth like a referral?

Adam: Mainly, yes. We’ve been around 12 to 13 years. The majority of our work now is repeat clients and word of mouth. Also when clients change companies or change roles they sometimes inherit a bit of a basket case and bring us to try and clean up what they have inherited. That is where most of our work comes from.

Brendan: The other thing that I wanted to ask you was sort of can you give us an example where there has been a real ROI on like the before you guys coming in and advising some changes to be made versus then you go in and implement some changes, see some, I guess grab some low hanging fruit to make some wins. Can you give us some example of something like that? I know I'm putting you a little bit on the spot there.

Adam: That is okay. We don't get to publish specific details of specific clients that often because most of our clients are in competitive areas but I can definitely give you some general examples. One example that springs to mind is for an aviation company that we're working for who had some very rich data and with our support had some very great data analytics capability. We actually worked out the analysis that some of the rules that were legal in terms of what they could operate with flight and duty times were probably not that great from a safety point of view, at the edges of the limit. Then there were other rules that they were being constrained by that were nowhere near the areas where safety would be affected. We were able to collect a lot of data that really built a safety case based on their own evidence, their own data that actually indicated that we thought it would be safer to use a different rule set to the one that they were currently needing to work to.

We were given a pilot approval and ultimately a longer standing approval to actually have a dispensation from the normal regulations which gave the company a great deal more flexibility but really at no loss from a safety point of view. Probably the lining on that story too was that they had much higher retention rates for staff and significantly lower sick leave rates as well which obviously are a very genuine cash improvement for that business. We’ve seen similar results in terms of reducing absenteeism in other projects that we've done in a variety of industries certainly in trucking, certainly in rail as well and even in emergency services situations. If you can be reducing absenteeism and staff turnover it's a very clear metric. It’s definitely very measurable from a dollar point of view but it’s clearly also indicating that people are happier and healthier. From our point of view that is a very meaningful metric to be able to track.

Brendan: I guess when you get wins like that it makes it a lot easier to, they'll be screaming for you to come back to do some more cool stuff like that.

Adam: At a point in time it does tend to become fairly self-funding which obviously helps a lot when you're trying to develop new initiatives. If you can go to your executives and say, look we've got evidence that we've saved $77,000 in this business in the last six months. What we'd like is your permission to spend $30,000 on this other initiative which we think is going to save us $100,000 a year and we're going to measure whether we are going to do that or not. It does make the case a lot easier to get over the line.

Brendan: You've got a conference I understand coming up. Tell us a little bit what you're doing and what's it called and how people can register.

Adam: We've had a lot of inquiries particularly from around the Asia Pacific Region for us to have an APAC event specifically focusing on fatigue management and human factors within industry. On March 12 to 14, 2019 we're hosting a three day event at Suntec Convention Center in Singapore. The first day will be a seminar format and the following two days, being days two and three will be a hands on workshop to be able to build or improve a fatigue management system. We’ve got some great speakers concerned. We’ve got people coming from NASA, from Boeing. We’ve got international academics participating, myself and my team obviously. Certainly people can go to our website and see the banner for that and click on that. Our website is IntegratedSafety.com.au. I'm sure you can probably put that in the notes for this episode as well.

Brendan: Yes, for sure. We’re going to wrap up now Adam. For a guy who is involved in sleep how much sleep do you get each night?

Adam: I definitely give it a bigger priority than I did in the past. I would say usually now I spend eight hours in bed. That usually translates into somewhere around seven and a half hours of sleep per day give or take. That definitely keeps me at my best.

Brendan: How old are you?

Adam: I am 43 about to turn 44.

Brendan: What do you like to do to keep fit?

Adam: I used to do lots of exercise. I worked out over the years that really I don't need to do as much as I thought that I needed to do. I'm reasonably fit and healthy but I tend to stick to doing one yoga session a week, one weight session a week, pretty heavy but safe weights and generally just one high interval cardio session a week. I find if I can do one of those each a week I stay pretty fit and well.

Brendan: Over the next 12 months what personal goal would you like to achieve?

Adam: I've got a three and a half year old daughter. Next year is her last year before she starts school. My real personal goal is actually to just keep a very solid balance between contributing and getting value from the work that we do in the business but also being around as much as I possibly can to be spending time with her and just enjoying that very special, last, little window before she starts 12 years of school.

Brendan: Then finally what business achievement would you like to be most remembered for? This is always a bit of a tricky one for people particularly when I put them on the spot.

Adam: I've always been driven personally and professionally by really trying to support humans to be healthy and safe and contribute valuably in their work but if I sort of extend it out into the future I think what I really like to be remembered by is to be the guy or one of the people who really was able to quantify meaningfully why looking after people in terms of good rosters and work patterns and supporting good sleep behaviors and things like that. I really would love to be remembered as one of the people who helped demonstrate quantitatively why that is good for not only safety but also just business in general and also profit in the bottom line. We’re certainly able to do that now and I don't even think a few years ago we're able to do that in a very clear way but now we certainly can.

Brendan: Thanks very much for coming on the show. If you want to learn more about Adam it's IntegratedSafety.com.au. If you're enjoying the show please remember to subscribe and leave us a review.

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TRANSCRIPT

Unknown Speaker
This is an ohs.com.au production Okay, welcome to episode 12 of the Australian Health and Safety business podcasts on Brendan Torazzi, the host of the show and also the director of ohs.com. Delay you, Australia's first health and safety training marketplace. Today I'm joined by Adam Fletcher, from integrated safety sport G'day, Adam.

Unknown Speaker
G'day, Brendan,

Unknown Speaker
how are we on this beautiful afternoon? I'm not sure what it's like in Melbourne. But Sydney is about a sunny day for the first time in weeks.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, no, it's absolutely beautiful here. I've thankfully had enough work to do from the office, and I'm in shorts and T shirt and delightful.

Unknown Speaker
How good is that? Yeah. Tell me a little bit about integrated safety support most of those do.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, thank you. So integrated safety support really was born. When I returned from the United States in 2006. I've been working as a research scientist for the US Army in Washington DC, specifically looking at sleep and fatigue issues for the US Army. And I realized I really wanted to move out of full time research and into solving challenges and problems related to fatigue and workplace performance and safety in government and industry organization. So I founded the company, and we've really been focused nearly 13 years now on very fatigue related issues. It's something that in early days with market for, it's very clear from the work of the brain, and the long term clients, I want to build up. But here we've really been able to establish a really valuable nation. And we can thankfully get to do really valuable and interesting work all over the world, mainly related to human fatigue and keeping people are alert and safe and productive in 24 hour work environment.

Unknown Speaker
So I'm curious about the US military, do they do they sleep star their, their people? Or because you often hear that sort of, you know, military they learn to survive on very little sleep? Is that the case? Or do they encourage sleep?

Unknown Speaker
It's a good question. I think it's something probably a number of people don't fully understand or clear a few myths myths about. And most people when they're going through their training, and certainly in basic training, and a lot of specialist trainings, they do have, you know, short to medium term sleep deprivation periods, so that you can learn what happens to you, personally, when you're put under a period where you're not getting enough sleep. But more often than not in, in operational environments, or operational theater, they generally do try and optimize the slip that people are getting unless it's going to be unsafe for people to stop. So that, you know, people think that the military is taking, you know, stimulants and, and other substances to sort of stay awake all the time. But But generally, they're only doing that it's not going to be safe for people to stop. They usually would rather people sleep and maintain high levels

Unknown Speaker
of performance. And of course, a military is a lot more than just, you know, I guess I had envisage on the coalface sexually in some kind of war or, or something like that. But there's lots of different parts of the military, obviously. Yeah, definitely. I

Unknown Speaker
mean, I think there's a much better understanding, you know, even in the last four or five years, I think there's a much better understanding that optimum performance is much, much more than being sufficiently awake. And you know, having your eyes open and breathing, I think there's a much better understanding of the nuances of, of situational awareness and other subtle executive performance capabilities. And sleep is clearly a major foundation for that. And that's understood, more, more so now than ever thought even four or five years ago.

Unknown Speaker
So when I met, you probably would have been about 12 or 13 years ago, when we were doing first bought the sleep pods to Australia. We soon discovered that, like, Australia kind of led the world in sleep science. What Why do you think that's the case? Why, I mean, we're such a small country in relation to the rest of the world. At least in population size, why do you think that Australia has been up there with

Unknown Speaker
definitely do punch above our weight? There's no no question about that. There's a lot of very high caliber fleet scientists and people in related fields like fatigue in Australia and New Zealand as well. Actually. I don't really know the answer to that question. I mean, there's certainly a lot of links to sleep in modern times in the US, I mean, they're very Discovery of REM sleep at Stanford University in the 50s. And, and then really the sort of expanding view of managing shift work and sleep in 24 hour work environments really started simultaneously, actually, in both the US and Europe, sort of in the late 70s, early 80s. But yeah, you're right, in the 90s and noughties and beyond, there's definitely a big concentration of people who are, you know, respected and considered expert in sleep and fatigue related areas in Australia. And I don't really know why. Perhaps there was some cultural elements. Perhaps there's other explanations, but I've been around this field for more than 25 years, and I don't have a really clear answer for that.

Unknown Speaker
And do you think the, you know, like, you being Australian, and running an Australian business that works with fatigue management and human factors, do you think that helps you when you're, you know, you're doing work overseas?

Unknown Speaker
I'll look, I think, I think most places in the world do still really love Australians. But I think, you know, we are generally like, most places around the

Unknown Speaker
world, because we live so far away where we're not neighbors, really to anyone,

Unknown Speaker
maybe maybe we're just a distant novelty usually. So I definitely think, you know, people are interested in spending time with Australians. And I think that the fact that but I also generally think, and I don't know whether this is just because of our multicultural heritage, or what it might be, but I mean, one of the pieces of feedback my team and I get a lot from clients around the world is that, you know, we tend to be very respectful and aware of cultural and other factors. But obviously, sleep and fatigue issues are fairly hardwired into us, as humans, in many ways, but there's obviously lots of cultural and local factors that can influence people's choices to sleep or not to sleep and things like that. And, you know, a lot of the feedback we get is that we're very aware and factor in a lot of those very local, cultural and other factors. And so there seems to be something about our ability to consider those things and not just try and force our solution on people, that seems to be very appreciated as well. So I think that's a factor.

Unknown Speaker
So integrated safety support, developing technology to help manage sleep, or how do you sit, as far as that goes moving forward.

Unknown Speaker
So we're certainly not going to be developing any hardware. So you know, monitoring devices be a, you know, risk worn sleep monitors, or camera cameras mounted on a dashboard, or in a cockpit. You know, those technology type solutions are definitely for others. We're building a lot of more software based solutions. So we create integrations of you know, fatigue, modeling software, into existing rough drinks, and scheduling systems and things like that. Early this year, we released our first app, which is a free app available on the Apple and Android App Store's called fatigue safe. And that's effectively a one minute personal self assessment for fatigue. And certainly, we've got a lot of data analytics capability. And so we're building a lot of software and an analysis type solutions, but not not so much in the hardware space.

Unknown Speaker
So it's more around the, I guess, like, when you consult a client, it's more about analyzing the data that they're collecting around sleep and fatigue management

Unknown Speaker
would that be? That is a lot of it, and certainly an increasing proportion of what we're focusing on. We still do some more traditional consulting in the sense that we might review fatigue related policies and procedures, we might carry out risk assessments for a particular business or or operational site. So that was sort of classic safety management consulting. But certainly, increasingly, clients are looking for more technology driven solutions, be they algorithms streamline analysis, or reporting capability and things like that. And we're certainly well fit out to be able to do that.

Unknown Speaker
Because like, Yeah, I'm seeing like a trend across so many industries, where data and data analytics is really where the world's moving. And we've got so much data that you've got to be able to analyze it and work out what it actually means.

Unknown Speaker
Exactly. I mean, I think the majority of organizations now do have huge volumes of data. What we discovered with our clients is that they're generally still very much data streams in silos. So there'll be a silo of safety related information that's separate from the silo of Human Resources Information, which will include, you know, over time and absenteeism and sick leave and sick leave and things like that. And that'll be separate to industrial things and I'm in the Data Analytics methods that we deploy quite a lot, you know, we really start being able to look across all these different data sets, then also scraping in other external data sets, like weather information, or public holiday calendars and things like that, and actually starting to see weather patterns exist in the previously separate streams of data, are getting a lot of very, very deep insights, and in some cases, very unexpected insights from a lot of those things. And it's something we've had a lot of success in the last few years, and it's definitely an area that's exploding quite quickly.

Unknown Speaker
And what percentage would you say, like all of your, of your practice would be overseas related work versus local work? on a percentage basis is, like 80%, local and 20%. overseas or?

Unknown Speaker
No, I mean, in the last couple of years, we've been nearly 50%. International, each year, where that work has been has has differed. And actually over the last 10 years is different from year to year, quite a bit. In the last year. We've done work in Colombia, Brazil, US, Canada, papa, papa, New Guinea, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, India, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, UK, that's probably the main countries. But yeah, probably about 50% In the last few years.

Unknown Speaker
Now, I've got to ask you, have you tapped into the government research grants?

Unknown Speaker
Not directly. No. I mean, when I when I was in academics full time, that was certainly a key source of funding and credibility. I do hold an adjunct professor role at the South Australia and work in some research projects, particularly supporting early career researchers, both PhD students and senior research staff. But to be honest, it's actually easier to get money from industry and also government agencies directly, rather than through the research channel. As long as you're actually going to deliver and provide the value that you promised, which we do. We tend to have a lot of quite big government contracts that do roll on year on year out, because, you know, we're, they're asking for things with promising them and delivering them, and they keep finding things for us to do. So. It's not really research funds, and not really something we try and tap into too much these days.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, I think I was more thinking around the like the export market development grants, given that you spend so much time overseas.

Unknown Speaker
Okay. Yeah, look, we certainly have have used the export marketing development grant and also the r&d programs as well. Because, yeah, certainly, we're not just doing straight. FIFA further consulting, we do develop and an innovate quite a lot. And that often means sunk costs within my business to try and develop things that we believe are going to be evaluated before we test them and evolve them. So yeah, we definitely do work with those programs.

Unknown Speaker
And there's some major trends in what industry is using your services, despite aviation, obviously, as one. You mentioned the military.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, look, it does change a bit on the sort of geopolitical situation in the world. I've observed. There's no question that aviation has been a core focus of our really ever since the beginning. And I mean, sleep and fatigue management is definitely quite strong in aviation, globally. before the GFC hit, we're seeing a really big upturn in activity and focus in the oil and gas and mining industries. But was that really fell off a cliff in a pretty major way when the GFC started fighting. Yeah. And then, you know, other industries that you think it would be really relevant for that trucking and rail and logistics and things like that. I mean, they're generally quite low margin businesses. And so our observation is they don't tend to get into things unless they're required to by the regulator. And so even though, you know, we certainly do do work in those areas, it tends to be a relatively low proportion. So for our business, at least, a lot of it is aviation, aerospace government agencies, which could include like emergency services, data, ambulance, paramedics, police, fire and things like that hospitals, but also then a spattering of mining oil and gas, logistics, and things like that.

Unknown Speaker
And so would I be right to assume that most of your work is won by sort of word of mouth? Is that a referral?

Unknown Speaker
Mainly Yeah, I mean, we've been around for 12 to 13 years, as I said, and the majority of our work now is, repeat, repeat clients and word of mouth. And also, when clients change companies or change roles, they sometimes inherit a bit of a basket case and bring in to try and clean up what they've inherited. So that is where most of our work comes from.

Unknown Speaker
And the other thing I want to ask you is sort of, can you give us an example of where there's been like a real ROI on you know, like a before you guys coming in and advising some changes to be made versus, you know, then you go in, you make, implement some changes, there's some, I guess, grab some low hanging fruit to make some wins, and give us an example of something like that. But again, a little bit on the spot there, but

Unknown Speaker
that's okay. I mean, we don't get to publish sort of specific details for specific clients that often because most of our clients are in competitive areas, but I can definitely give you some some general examples. I mean, one example that springs to mind was for an aviation company that we're working for, who has some very rich data and with our support, had some really great data analytics capability. And we actually worked out through the analysis that some of the rules that were legal in terms of what they could operate with flattened GD times, were probably not that great from a safety point of view at the edges of the limits. But then there were other rules without being constrained by that were nowhere near the, you know, the areas where safety would be affected. So, you know, we were able to collect a lot of data that really built a safety case, based on their own evidence, their own data, that actually indicated that we thought it would be safer to use a different rule set to the one that that we're currently needing to work to. And we weren't given a pilot approval, and ultimately, a longer standing approval to actually have a dispensation from the normal regulations, which gave the company a great deal more flexibility, but really no loss from a safety point of view. And probably the lining on that story, too, was that they had much higher retention rates of staff and significantly lower sick leave rates as well, which will be fair to have very genuine cash improvement for that business. And we've seen similar results in terms of reducing absenteeism in other projects we've done in a variety of industries, certainly in trucking, certainly in rail, as well. And even in emergency services situation. So if you can be reducing absenteeism and staff turnover. It's a very clear metric. It's definitely very measurable from $1 point of view, but it's clearly also indicating that people are happier and healthier. And from our from our point of view, that's a very meaningful metric to be able to track.

Unknown Speaker
Cool, okay. So yeah, I guess when you get wins like that, it makes it a lot easier to, you know, they'll

Unknown Speaker
be they'll be screaming for you to come back to do some more cool stuff like that. Yeah, well, it does. At a point in time, it does tend to become fairly self funding, which obviously helps a lot when you're trying to develop new initiatives, if you can go to your executives and say, Well, look, we've got evidence that, you know, we've saved $77,000 In this bit of the business in the last six months, you know, what we like is your permission to spend 30,000 On this other initiative, which we think is going to save us 100 grand a year. And we're going to measure whether we are going to do that or not. It does make the case, a lot easier to get over the line.

Unknown Speaker
Great. Now you've got a conference on understanding coming up. Tell us a little bit about what you're what you're doing, and what's it called and how people can register?

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, we do. Thank you. So we've had a lot of inquiries, particularly from around the Asia Pacific region, for us to have a an AIPAC event, specifically focusing on fatigue management and human factors within industry. So on the 12th, to the 14th of March in 2019. We're hosting our three day events at Suntec Convention Center in Singapore. The first day will be a seminar format, and the following two days being days two and three will be a hands on workshop to be able to build or improve a fatigue management system. We've got some great speakers confirmed we've got people coming from NASA from Boeing. We've got international academics participating, myself and my team, obviously. And yeah, certainly people can go to our website and see the banner for that. You click on that website integrated safety.com.au And I'm sure you can probably put that in the notes for this episode as well. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker
for sure. For sure. Okay, well look well. gonna wrap up now, Adam. So for a guy involved with sleep, how much sleep do you get each night?

Unknown Speaker
I definitely give it a bigger priority than I did in the past. I would say usually now I spend eight hours in bed. That usually translates into somewhere around seven and a half hours of sleep per day I get will take but yeah, that definitely keeps me at my best.

Unknown Speaker
Okay, how old? Are you?

Unknown Speaker
I am 43 about to turn 44.

Unknown Speaker
Okay, and then what do you like to do to get fit?

Unknown Speaker
I used to do lots of exercise I've worked out over the years, that really I don't need to do as much as I thought I needed to do. I'm reasonably fit and healthy, I would say that I tend to just stick to doing one yoga session a week, one weight session a week pretty heavy faith weights, and generally just one high interval cardio session a week and I find if I can do one of those, each a week, I stay pretty, pretty fit. And well.

Unknown Speaker
That's great. Now, over the next 12 months, what personal goal would you like to achieve?

Unknown Speaker
Well, I've got to train a half year old daughter, and next year is her last year before she starts school. And so my real personal goal is actually to just keep a very solid balance between contributing and getting value from the work we do in the business, but also being around as much as I possibly can to be spending time with her and just enjoying that very special last little window before she starts 12 years of school.

Unknown Speaker
Yeah, that's great. And then finally, what business achievement would you like to be most remembered for? This is always a bit of a tricky one for people, particularly when I put them on the spot?

Unknown Speaker
That's a great question. I mean, I've always been driven personally and professionally by really trying to support humans humans to be healthy and safe and and feel like they've contributed valuable in in their work. But if if I sort of extended out into the future, I think what I'd really like to be remembered by is to be the die or one of the people who really was able to quantify meaningfully, why looking after people in terms of good rosters and work patterns and supporting good sleep behaviors and things like that. I'd really love to be remembered as one of the people that helped demonstrate quantitatively why that's good for not only safety, but also just business in general and also profit and the bottom line, because we're certainly able to do that now. And I don't even think a few years ago, we were able to do that in a very clear way that now we certainly can.

Unknown Speaker
Right? Well, Adam Well, thanks very much for coming on the show. And if you want to hear more, or learn more about Adam, it's integrated safety.com.au And then finally, if you're enjoying the show, please remember to subscribe and leave us a review

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