A colleague asks you not to report fatigue
At 21:40, halfway through a twelve-hour night shift, a colleague tells you they have taken an over-the-counter cold remedy that causes drowsiness and that they have not slept in 20 hours. They are due to operate a piece of equipment that requires sustained attention for the next three hours. They ask you not to tell the supervisor because they need the overtime payment and a formal report would put their probation at risk. You are not their manager, but you are the senior person on the floor. There are four other staff on shift, all already assigned to tasks that cannot be paused; the supervisor is off-site and reachable by phone. The next scheduled break is in two hours.
1. What is your immediate action, and what is the limit of the confidentiality you can offer?
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The immediate action is to keep the person off the equipment, now, before any discussion of consequences. That is a floor-level decision I do not need permission to make: operating attention-demanding equipment after 20 hours awake plus a sedating remedy is a foreseeable harm, and their probation status does not change the physics.
Confidentiality boundary - be honest up front, not afterwards. I can offer not to broadcast the reason to the whole floor. I cannot offer to conceal it from the supervisor, because the supervisor owns the staffing decision and would be making it on false information. Saying "I'll keep this between us" and then calling the supervisor is a betrayal that costs more trust than the refusal would have.
The sentence to use: "I'm not going to put you on that equipment tonight, and I'm not going to keep that from [supervisor] - what I will do is make sure the call is about tonight's cover, not about your probation."
Then act: call the supervisor immediately with the cover problem stated first, so the conversation starts from operational fact.
2. The colleague refuses to stand down and says they will operate the equipment anyway. What do you do?
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At this point the issue is no longer counselling, it is control of the equipment. Move to the physical and procedural levers, in order of least force:
- Deny access quietly. Do not leave the workstation unattended or the equipment unlocked; a public argument in front of others hardens the position and creates an audience for a disciplinary outcome nobody needs.
- Escalate live. Call the supervisor while the person is present, state the facts neutrally, and ask for a direction. Do not negotiate the safety judgement with the colleague in the gap - that gap is where nothing gets decided until 00:40.
- Name the consequence once, without threats: if access is forced after a direction to stand down, that becomes a safety event with my name on the record and I will report it as such.
What I must not do: absorb the risk to keep the peace, or promise a delay to "see how they go" for an hour. The reason the situation is uncomfortable is that all the kind options are already gone; the remaining choice is between an uncomfortable report now and an incident later.
3. After the shift, the colleague says the report will cost them their job. What is the fair handling now that the immediate risk has passed?
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Fairness now runs through accuracy, not through softening the report.
Write the report to the facts: what was said, at what time, what the colleague reported about sleep and medication, what I directed, what the supervisor directed, and what actually happened. Do not editorialise about motive, do not describe the remedy as "abuse", and do not leave out that I was told in confidence and chose to escalate - my conduct should be as visible as theirs.
Include the context that is genuinely mitigating: the person was not concealing a pattern, they disclosed to a senior colleague at the first opportunity, and the disclosure itself is the thing we want people to do. A report that reads as punishment for disclosure teaches the next person to say nothing.
Separate the two questions for the supervisor: fitness to work tonight, and whatever happens to probation. I can contribute evidence to the first. I should not be the source of a recommendation on the second - that decision belongs to someone with the full employment picture, and me advocating a lenient outcome in a formal report muddies the record.