At 2pm, an organisation can look very different to how it looks at 2am.
Across the UK, millions of people work through the night to keep our hospitals, transport networks, factories, warehouses, utilities, supermarkets and essential services running. Night work is critical to our economy, yet the experience of the people doing it can remain surprisingly invisible.
We know that working against our natural circadian rhythms can disrupt sleep and contribute to fatigue, with implications for health, safety and performance. But supporting night workers isn’t simply about telling people to get more sleep. The way night work is designed, managed and supported matters too.
At Night Club, we’ve now supported more than 15,000 night and shift workers across multiple sectors. What we’ve learnt is that some of the most useful changes don’t necessarily require completely redesigning operations. They start with understanding the experience of night workers and asking better questions about how work is organised around them.
Here are five places employers can start.
1. Are you monitoring fatigue?
Our Bright Nights research, conducted via YouGov with more than 280 HR professionals in organisations employing night workers, found that only 41% reported that their company monitors staff tiredness or fatigue.
That leaves a significant gap in understanding. If fatigue is a recognised operational risk, employers need some way of understanding where it exists and when it becomes most acute. This doesn’t necessarily mean introducing another complicated measurement system. Existing information can tell you a great deal: accidents and near misses, absence, overtime, turnover, employee feedback and patterns in performance can all help build a picture.
The challenge is that this information often sits in different parts of the organisation. Safety teams see incidents, HR sees absence and retention, operations sees performance and workers experience the fatigue itself. Bringing those perspectives together can reveal patterns that would otherwise remain hidden.
The most useful next step may therefore be surprisingly simple: put fatigue on the agenda. Include it in employee surveys and safety conversations. Ask about it in exit interviews. Look at whether incidents cluster at particular points in a shift or sequence of shifts. Most importantly, ask night workers directly what makes it easier or harder for them to stay alert and recover.
2. Does your employee experience really operate 24/7?
Does your head office close at 5pm? Because your night workforce doesn’t.
During the day, employees may have access to managers, HR, occupational health, training, decent food, wellbeing activities and senior leaders. At night, much of that infrastructure can disappear. The result is that two people working for the same organisation can have very different employee experiences simply because one works at 2pm and the other at 2am.
Solving this doesn’t mean recreating the entire daytime organisation overnight. It means looking deliberately at the moments where night workers are disadvantaged. Are important communications reaching them? Can they access training without attending outside their normal hours? Are rest areas and healthy food available? Can they access the same health and wellbeing support? When did a senior leader last visit the operation at night?
A useful exercise is to audit your employee experience through the eyes of someone working a night shift. Follow their journey from arriving at work to going home and compare it with the experience of a daytime colleague. Small changes – from how briefings are scheduled to when occupational health appointments are available – can make support feel genuinely designed for a 24/7 workforce rather than adapted from a nine-to-five one.
3. Are you designing for recovery, not just the rota?
A shift pattern can look perfectly reasonable on a spreadsheet. Real life is more complicated.
For somebody finishing work at 6am or 7am, the hours before their next shift aren’t simply available for sleep. There is the journey home, eating and winding down while the rest of the world wakes up. Daytime sleep is often shorter and more easily disrupted by light, noise and everyday life. For workers with children or caring responsibilities, school and nursery runs, appointments and family life can reduce the opportunity for recovery even further.
That means employers need to think beyond whether a rota technically provides enough hours between shifts and consider whether it creates a realistic opportunity for recovery. Consecutive nights, shift length, overtime and changes between day and night schedules all deserve attention.
There isn’t one perfect shift pattern for every workforce, and operational realities will always matter. But involving workers in shift design, regularly reviewing how rotas work in practice and identifying particularly difficult transitions can uncover improvements. Sometimes relatively modest changes to scheduling can make a significant difference to people’s ability to recover.
4. Are you giving people the skills to work nights well?
We train people extensively to do their jobs. We don’t always train them to work nights.
Night work asks people to sleep when their biology is promoting wakefulness and to remain alert when their bodies naturally expect to be asleep. Research looking at permanent night workers found that fewer than 3% showed complete adjustment of their internal circadian clock to night work. Feeling tired isn’t simply something people can train themselves out of.
Yet our Bright Nights research found that only 20% of surveyed employers said they provide induction or training on managing sleep and a healthy lifestyle for shift workers. There is a clear opportunity here. Practical education can help people understand what is happening to their bodies and make better-informed decisions around sleep, light, caffeine, food, exercise and recovery. That support is particularly valuable when someone first starts night work, changes shift pattern or returns to nights after time away.
It also changes the conversation. Instead of fatigue being treated solely as an individual’s responsibility – employers can recognise that managing night work is a shared challenge. Organisations can improve the conditions and systems around people, while giving workers practical tools to manage the parts they can control.
5. Has tiredness become part of the culture?
Perhaps the hardest issue to identify is fatigue that nobody talks about anymore. In long-established night-working environments, being tired can simply become accepted as part of the job. People develop coping strategies, colleagues joke about exhaustion and experienced workers learn to push through.
That makes culture as important as policy. Workers need to feel able to say they are fatigued without believing it will be interpreted as weakness or an inability to do their job. Managers also need the confidence to recognise fatigue and know what they can realistically do when someone raises it.
Creating that culture doesn’t require dramatic interventions. Include fatigue in regular safety and wellbeing conversations. Train managers to talk about it. Encourage teams to discuss what helps them manage difficult shifts. Ask experienced night workers what they wish they had known when they started. And make sure that reporting fatigue actually leads somewhere.
The goal isn’t to eliminate tiredness entirely – that isn’t realistic in night work. It is to stop avoidable fatigue becoming invisible simply because everyone has become accustomed to it.
Better night work starts with better questions
There is no single intervention that will solve the challenges of night work. What works in a hospital may not work in a warehouse, an airport, a factory or a transport network. But there is a growing opportunity for employers to learn from each other about what does work.
What happens when organisations redesign shift patterns with recovery in mind? How are employers measuring fatigue effectively? What support actually changes behaviour? How can HR, safety, occupational health and operations work together rather than treating night work as separate issues? And, crucially, what do night workers themselves say would make the greatest difference?
These are some of the questions behind Night Club’s new State of UK Night Work research ambition. We want to bring together employers, academics and experts to understand how night work is currently being designed and supported across the UK, identify promising practice and explore where employers can make meaningful change.
We’re starting that conversation at our next Night Club Consortium: State of UK Night Work, bringing together senior leaders from organisations employing night and shift workers.
Contributors include Andy Perry, Supply Chain Director at Waitrose & Partners; Catherine Muirden, Chief People Officer and Board Chair; Professor Adam Whitworth from the University of Strathclyde and leading employers in our 24/7 economy.
Wednesday 28 October 2026 | 12:00–14:00 | Online
If your organisation employs people at night, we’d like you to be part of the conversation: to share what is working, learn from other employers and help us build a better picture of night work across the UK.
Because better night work doesn’t start with assuming we know what workers need. It starts by understanding what is actually happening when most of the organisation has gone home.
References
Night Club (2025), Bright Nights: An Employer Guide to Supporting Night and Shift Workers. Employer research conducted via YouGov with more than 280 HR professionals working in organisations employing night workers.
Health and Safety Executive (2006), Managing Shift Work: Health and Safety Guidance (HSG256). Guidance on assessing and managing the health and safety risks associated with shift work, including fatigue, working patterns and recovery.
Moore, S. & Ballardie, R. (2024), The Health and Safety Impacts of Night Working. Trades Union Congress. Research and evidence review covering sleep, fatigue, recovery and the experiences of UK night workers.
Folkard, S. (2008), “Do Permanent Night Workers Show Circadian Adjustment? A Review Based on the Endogenous Melatonin Rhythm.” Chronobiology International, 25(2–3), 215–224. Review of studies of permanent night workers, finding complete circadian adjustment in fewer than 3% of workers studied.
Night Club programme data (2026). More than 15,000 night and shift workers supported through Night Club programmes.
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