Are Managers Waking Up To Sleep?

There is clearly a growing unease that long working hours and the demands on employees for ever greater levels of commitment and flexibility, combined with an increasingly ubiquitous 24/7 culture, is having a detrimental impact on both the quality and quantity of sleep enjoyed by significant swathes of the population. It is also becoming clear that this no longer applies only to those working in occupations traditionally associated with long or irregular hours. Equally, the effect that this could have on levels of employee productivity, innovation and creativity, as well as on health and safety, and broader issues such as voluntary turnover, while not definitively established, is also a matter of notable concern.

It is apparent that, in light of this, certain steps are being taken to attempt to ameliorate some of the potential consequences of this problem. A handful of companies across both the US and Europe have, for instance, developed sleep friendly policies, including education workshops that include discussions of the importance of healthy and restful sleep or, in some instances, even the provision of rest or napping facilities. Such awareness would appear, however, to be something of a minority phenomenon, and one that is only just beginning to develop in the UK business environment.

While the conclusions that can be drawn from the above data are somewhat limited by the low response rate, the research so far does suggest several things. Most notably:

1. Despite an apparently widespread concern that increasing pressures faced by employees working at all levels are having a detrimental effect on their ability to sleep, and that poor sleep can present a very real cost to employers in terms of productivity and indeed safety, at present little if anything is currently being done in the UK to systematically address the issue.

2. In part, this is no doubt a result of a lack of awareness of much of the research that has only recently been published charting the links between poor quality sleep and productivity, as well as a general assumption that sleep is only really an issue for particular sectors or employees that undertake particular patterns of work.

3. It could also, of course, equally be a consequence of a cultural resistance to the idea that sleep can in any way be a company-sanctioned activity; that it is something integral to creative and productive work.

As a result of this, we would suggest that it is not only necessary that more detailed research work be carried out into those policies and practices that do currently exist amongst UK companies, but equally that there is a need to publicise much of the existing data that suggests that sleep, while predominantly a private concern, is something that has very real and significant implications for both the well-being of individual employees, as well as organisational competitiveness.