Asleep on the job - the financial impact of insufficient sleep

We’ve all experienced times in our lives where we’ve missed out on vital zzz’s; it might have been partying much too late into the night, a distressed child, sleep disorders, a busy mind, working late to meet a deadline or due to travel. Whatever the cause has been, we know how quickly this can affect our mood and behaviour. Our levels of patience decline, our attention to detail wavers and sometimes our inspiration to get things done dissipates completely.

When we feel like this, the last thing we want to do is go to work, yet we do. And did you know that it’s not the safest thing to do either? Research has indicated that a person who has been up for 17-19 hours, (waking at 6 am and hitting the hay at 11 pm) has a performance level of someone with a blood-alcohol level of 0.05 percent and after 20 hours of wakefulness, it’s equivalent to a blood-alcohol level of 0.1 percent. That’s like turning up for work drunk.

Prolonged periods of time with a lack of sleep leads to burnout and many unsound decisions. Arianna Huffington, Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of The Huffington Post experienced this firsthand. It wasn’t until she collapsed and hit her face on her desk, that she realised how she was running herself ground. Her book Thrive discusses more the importance of sleep and other organisational practices and solutions you can adopt. Additionally, her latest book The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time explores how our “cultural dismissal of sleep as time wasted compromises our health and our decision-making, undermines our work lives and our personal lives.”

Here are some ways that sleep-deprived brains financially impact your business:

Decrease in productivity

Insufficient sleep reduces attention to detail and various measures of cognition, including complex decision-making and memory. The ability to recall short-term memory declines. Also significantly reduced is the learning of new tasks along with deterioration of innovative thinking. While the performance of tasks can still execute well, the duration of tasks increases. (Durmer and Dinges, 2005)

Increase in company health costs and time off

It doesn’t matter how infrequently your sleep-deprived employee shows up to work - or doesn’t, it still tremendously over time impacts the organisation. If employees take time off due to burn out, lack of sleep, sickness (which increases when the immune system is running low), adrenal fatigue or other ailments of such kind the business pays: financially for time off and in the loss of productivity.

Decline in creative thinking

McKinsey research published the article, The Organizational Cost of Insufficient Sleep [http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-organizational-cost-of-insufficient-sleep#0] and it beautifully illustrated how “one study has shown that a good night’s sleep leads to new insights: participants who enjoyed one were twice as likely as those who didn’t to discover a hidden shortcut in a task.”

Without the basic cognitive functions, innovative ideas and solutions won’t be possible to drive your company forward.

Decline in communication and support skills

Lack of sleep also prevents your management team (amongst others) to communicate effectively with their teams. They may be less tolerant in certain situations and cause conflict rather than mediate any temporary problems. Socioemotional processing, emotional reactions and building trusted relationships falls short when you have a tired employee. Imagine then how poorly this individual would handle important meeting with stakeholders or potential clients. Remember, regardless of how below acceptable performance presents itself, it is a cause of financial loss.

And remember, lack of sleep doesn’t just affect the workplace. “Sleepiness is a significant, and possibly growing, contributor to serious motor vehicle injuries. Almost 20 percent of all serious car crash injuries in the general population are associated with driver sleepiness, independent of alcohol effects (Connor et al., 2002).”

These are just some ways that sleep deprived employees are affecting the performance of your company. It may seem minor, yet sleepy employees add up in business performance losses.

Because the world is changing and there is a new awareness around organisational health and business success, there are many strategies and policies that you can implement to ensure your workforce have rested and come to work inspired, rested and ready to kick goals!