In the Deep of The Night

By VALERIE MARCHANT

Richard Parker loves to work from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. A member of the Home Depot night staff, he restocks merchandise and serves customers at the vast Marina del Rey, Calif., store, where 6,000 customers visit each 24-hour day. Parker, 28, views his team as "a tight-knit family. We are the gears, not the outcasts," he says.

There are more than 23 million people like Parker in the U.S. who do not work a 9-to-5, Monday-to-Friday week. In fact, about 20% of the American work force works on schedules that cross the normal 9-to-5 lines. And that percentage can only increase with the advent of nonstop stock markets and ceaseless financial trading, round-the-clock shopping and the growing importance of the unsleeping Internet. The old notion of blue-collar night-shifters no longer applies: managers and professionals, who just 10 years ago made up only a tiny percentage of the shift work force, now account for more than 15%.

Many workers consider the night shift a liberating experience. Home Depot's Parker can chauffeur his grandmother around the Los Angeles area and relax by his backyard pool during the day. Andrea Shalal-Esa, the night reporter for the Washington bureau of Reuters news agency, likes working from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. because it allows her to be a daytime mom to her two children. William Cockshoot, a Chicago commodities trader, finds he is better able to catch a price spread at night that would be snapped up faster by competitors during the day. The corporate investigators who work for International Business Research of Princeton, N.J., a firm that guards against computer hackers, can work at home because their beepers and e-mails alert them when their suspects go online. For some people, nightwork plays better to their adventurous nature: Richard Tapp, a deputy sheriff in Orange County, N.C., is charged by the adrenaline rush he feels at night, when he gets more interesting calls because "the freaks come out."

But in a booming economy, unorthodox working hours also pose important problems. How will companies manage to fill night and weekend positions when they can't find enough people to work a traditional week? Even more important, how will they persuade the highly skilled and well educated, who already have the upper hand in today's tight labor market, to work those odd hours? While devising new ways to attract and hold all types of employees, managers also need to decrease the huge costs associated with off-hours shiftwork. Industrial and other accidents resulting from exhaustion already cost U.S. industry and society over $77 billion a year. One of the most immediate effects is a growing demand on companies to show greater flexibility and creativity in designing jobs. Richard Coleman, author of The 24 Hour Business and president of a consulting group, advises firms "first of all to find out what their employees want and then choose schedules that fit the company's needs."

Charles Schwab, one of the country's leading financial-services firms, is putting that principle into practice at its four regional call centers, in Indianapolis, Ind.; Orlando, Fla.; Phoenix, Ariz.; and Denver. Some 300 of the 3,500 brokers and customer-service representatives at the centers work in the evening or at night, answering calls on everything from account balances to securities prices. When Deborah Maldeney, now a team manager at Schwab's Indianapolis center, joined the company, she took advantage of one of the 40 different job schedules Schwab offered her. She needed to begin work after finishing her evening M.B.A. classes at Butler University, so she chose a 10 p.m.-to-7 a.m. schedule. Maldeney believes that for her and many of her colleagues, working at night "is the best."

Often, though, an administrator cannot be flexible enough. In those cases, Coleman suggests that a company make a rigid schedule more appealing by offering an attractive trade-off. For companies such as Corning and Goodyear, his consulting firm has created schedules that include 10 to 20 weeks of time off each year or that offer a seven- or eight-day break a month. Another way to make dismal shifts more appealing is to pay better. Coleman has found that many nightworkers will accept a difficult schedule if they can also work predictable overtime hours. "They could have a schedule," says Coleman, "with built-in overtime that rewards them with 30% more pay than a traditional worker while giving them 150 days off a year and never working more than two days in a row."

Experts strongly recommend, too, that managers communicate effectively with nightworkers. At the UCLA Medical Center, an e-mail system was recently installed to improve communications, but Lea Ann Cook, a director at the transplant/surgical specialties intensive-care units, noticed that nurses were still frustrated at having limited access to classes and training and "still don't feel in the loop, because [e-mail] can't replace human contact." At firms such as Schwab, management works hard at dealing with night employees just as they would dayworkers.

There is increasing evidence that people who work the night shift pay a physiological toll as they depart from the basic time clock dictated by their circadian rhythms. They also have more frequent job-related accidents and have to struggle harder to maintain their at-work focus. And when workers suffer, companies suffer. Dr. Martin Moore-Ede, CEO of Boston-based Circadian Technologies and author of The Twenty-Four-Hour Society, observes that the firms that have chosen to "push it to the max get hit later by the hidden problem of fatigue, burnout and stress." Sometimes the results can be disastrous. According to Moore-Ede, industrial deaths and injuries related to shiftwork cost the U.S. economy as much as $1.5 billion a year, and airplane crashes and plant explosions another $5 billion. Truck drivers alone are involved in fatigue-related accidents that cost $5 billion annually. Disasters and accidents aside, human fatigue costs the U.S. economy an estimated $6 billion in health costs and $55 billion a year in lost productivity.

Ed Coburn, publisher of the newsletter ShiftWork Alert, says American companies have gradually become more aware of the problems inherent in altering human circadian rhythms. Yet he observes that U.S. job culture still has not woken up, so to speak, to the need for more adaptation. Doctors, he notes, enter residency programs expected to work 36 hours in two days, having been taught almost nothing about how to sleep during the day or how to use naps to offset the effects of exhaustion. "The macho thing is very significant," he says. "Those who have been living with this for so long believe that the people who did not make it were the wimps. Very often the only catalyst for change [in such environments] is an accident."

Peggy Westfall-Lake, a consultant and author of Shiftwork Safety and Performance, is not about to let any accidents happen at the organization where she works, Williams, an Oklahoma-based energy and communications company. She firmly believes education and "fatigue-countermeasure training" can prevent the problems and costs caused by tiredness.

Westfall-Lake and "wellness supervisor" Jill Thieman have spearheaded a pilot project at a gas-gathering and -processing operation in the Four Corners. Some 400 shiftworkers, including field technicians, plant operators, maintenance workers and office staff, receive information about health and safety via an Intranet site, corporate fairs, family events and special classes. Employees can use company-owned vehicles to car-pool (thus minimizing driving fatigue), take time off while at work to exercise briefly on treadmills and stationary bicycles, and use light boxes that are designed to suppress melatonin, which induces sleep. So far, a third of those involved in the Williams program have reported improvements in their alertness and energy levels. Many other U.S. companies, like Sony Electronics, Brown & Williamson Tobacco and Dow Chemical, are offering their employees innovative programs similar to those at Williams. Some--though not many--U.S. companies, like Schwab, Deloitte Touche, Schlumberger and CSX Corp., even approve of at-work naps to improve alertness.

No matter how many adjustments corporations make, of course, some people will never embrace the off-hours routine. For six years, John Wheeler, 39, was a night news writer and producer for CNN in Atlanta. "I was out of synch with the rest of the world," he recalls. He quit last fall, and insists, "You couldn't pay me enough to go back." Instead, he chose to become a 9-to-5 public relations specialist for United Parcel Service--a company that happens to be one of the major employers of nightworkers in the U.S.

--With reporting by Marc Hequet/St. Paul, Delphine Matthieussent/Washington, David Nordan/Atlanta and Jacqueline Savaiano/Los Angeles

With reporting by Marc Hequet/St. Paul, Delphine Matthieussent/Washington, David Nordan/Atlanta and Jacqueline Savaiano/Los Angeles