Written by National Wellness Institute
More than three quarters of workers feel tired many days of the week. This startling finding comes from a study of 1,139 workers conducted by Virgin Pulse and vielife. In addition, 30% of workers felt unhappy or very unhappy with the quality or quantity of their sleep, and more than one in eight workers “dozed” off at work at least once per week.
Lack of proper sleep has bee linked to issues like cardiovascular disease, weakened immune systems, and reduced memory and cognitive function. Aside from effecting the afflicted workers, employers are seeing a real loss in profitability and productivity from their workforce, to the tune of nearly $2,000 per worker per year.
Unsurprisingly, the reasons many workers report being tired at their job is due to insufficient sleep at night, either by quantity or quality. The reasons for this poor sleep were partially due to forces the employer could effect, such as shift work or international travel, and partially due to forces outside the employer’s control, such as television habits before bed, drinking caffeinated drinks, and excess alcohol consumption.
Employers who wish to make a positive impact on their workers’ sleep patterns can encourage employees to make positive changes to their environment and lifestyle. Changes such as wearing earplugs, running a fan for white noise, and decreasing extra light (primarily from electronic devices) had influence of study participants’ sleep, as did changes to behavior such as increasing exercise overall, but decreasing exercise close to bedtime.
One final finding of the study is that many of the employees afflicted with poor sleep would not have made any changes without intervention. If their employer had not assisted them in finding remedies for their poor sleep, they would have continued trying to cope with it as they had been doing previously.