- 76% of control room operators report experiencing moderate to high levels of fatigue during or after their shift, up from 58% in 2020.
- 63% of operators say they’ve made avoidable mistakes or missed alerts due to fatigue, especially in night shifts or during crisis response.
- 52% of operators say they sleep less than 6 hours between shifts during busy operational weeks, contributing to cumulative fatigue.
These are some of the headline statistics we’ve come across in recent times, which never been more challenging to be a control room operator. Operators must maintain intense focus for extended periods while dealing with parallel streams of input. This leads to an unsustainable cognitive load. It’s not just about multitasking, there is also multi-system decision-making, where the cost of a wrong judgment can be disastrous.
When there’s far too much at one time demanding attention, prioritization becomes nearly impossible. And the human brain, no matter how trained or experienced, has its limits. Decision fatigue sets in as operators are forced to constantly choose where to focus, what to escalate, and what to ignore.
The Fragmented Reality of Data Access
To make things more difficult, control rooms often rely on fragmented systems. A single task, like diagnosing an equipment anomaly, might require consulting five or six separate tools: one for asset history, another for real-time video, a third for workforce availability, and others for maintenance schedules or environmental factors.
This fragmented approach forces operators to become the connective body between systems, mentally stitching together context across disparate platforms. It’s inefficient, exhausting, and potentially dangerous, because the human brain was never designed to process data like a machine. In the control room, rather than expecting an operator to manage numerous different systems simultaneously, why not have one system helping numerous operators, simultaneously instead?
References:
- (Source: Global Control Room Workforce Wellbeing Study, 2025)
- (Source: Industrial Safety Council Report on Human Factors in Operations, 2025)
- (Source: Occupational Health & Safety Journal, Q1 2025)
