Posted on October 16th, 2009 by Craig Maltby, Editor
My new immune health care reform initiative…and no public option!
If I ruled the world, or at least was a health and wellness director of some organization, I might try to persuade the top
brass that a new company policy should be put into effect from October 1 through Dec 31. That policy would decree that official business hours begin at 9:30 a.m.
This policy would encourage people to get as close to 8 hours of sleep each night as possible during the three-month stretch that ushers in the cold and flu season.
I’m confident this would not only result in fewer sick employees during this time, but fewer sick employees during remainder of the flu season–January through March. More immune systems would be fortified and prepared to take on the rest of the winter. I’m also confident that productivity would increase during this stretch of shorter work day. Holiday stress could be reduced as well, making for a nice multiplier effect.
The links in this post will fill out the research picture for you on this topic. Beyond that, I’m also going by my own experience. We’ve got a little flu developing in our household (one child had a low-grade fever, but seems to have gotten over it in a day–knock on wood, she’s on immune balance supplementation); my wife is feeling a little sluggish, but that’s it. She’s also home this morning, just to keep things in check). So today, rather than get up at 5:30 when my kids do for their marching band practice, I rolled over and stayed comatose until 7:30. That gave me a solid 8 hours of sleep. And I do feel like I get through the day more alert and with it, rather than driving to my office in morning darkness feeling like a half-baked zombie.
When you think about it, if you’re a company CEO or business owner, would you rather have your employees grab an extra hour of sack time and increase their chances of getting through the winter healthy, or would you prefer the traditional 7 or 8 start time and know that the average employee (in the private sector) will take a 9 days off for sick time each year? For a 1,000-employee company, that’s 72,000 hours of lost productivity spread throughout the enterprise. If you push back start time by 1.5 hours for that 3-month period, that same company is giving up 90,000 hours of staff time, so at first it doesn’t appear to be a smart move. However, if you factor in the fact that many people come to work sick because their sick day allocation is used up or they feel their job is in jeopardy if they stay home when they’re sick (which is insane, but it happens), they’re getting your healthy people sick. If a 9:30 start policy were in force, perhaps fewer sick employees wouldn’t be infecting other employees, and the 64,000-hour average could come down, which then puts that difference on the plus side of the ledger for later starts (and more sleep). You’d be reducing not only sick-days taken, but also days that employees ARE actually sick, whether they stay home or not. That’s got to be beneficial to the organization.
According to a men’s health web article, ” a 2002 study…showed that sleep helps fortify the immune system: When flu shots were administered to two groups of men, those who slept normally for 10 nights in a row had twice as many flu-fighting antibodies as those who slept just four hours per night.”
Fewer sleep-deprived employees may also mean greater creativity and brain power during the day, less stress-induced crabbiness, more successful meetings. Total workplace nirvana. Right!
Of course, one risk is that if a lot of people know they can come in later in the morning, rather than getting an extra hour or so of sleep, they stay up later, and end up in no better position than before. But wouldn’t it be worth a taking a shot (not flu shot) to test this theory?
