Employers offer the ultimate perk: A good night’s sleep
New Balance, the shoe company, wanted to help its employees sleep better.
So in October it introduced Dayzz, a mobile app that offers personal recommendations for better sleep. If users say they watch TV in bed, the app might send a text at bedtime to turn it off. If it’s taking users too long to fall asleep, the app might suggest they get out of bed temporarily and listen to music. Employees can also use the app to scan noise and light intensity levels in their bedrooms and chat online with a sleep coach.
After several years of recognising sleep’s role in productivity and controlling healthcare costs, some US employers are giving employees tools to do something about it.
While experts applaud the attention being paid to workers’ sleep, some raise questions about privacy or how useful sleep data will be for many employees if it’s provided without context.
Employer interest has risen as sleep science has improved, the World Health Organisation has recognised burnout as an “occupational phenomenon”, and companies have become more focused on mental health, says Arianna Huffington, founder of the wellness company Thrive Global.
BlackRock, the giant asset management firm, started buying the Oura Ring, a sleep and activity tracker, for select employees in a pilot programme launched early last year. “What we’ve been seeing so far . . . is that the measurement makes them more aware,” says Emily Haisley, a managing director at BlackRock who specialises in behavioral science. “They can see the impact of exercise and earlier bedtimes. Some people have started meditating before bed or stopping screens before bed.”
Some employers in fields like transportation, where safety is critical, have been focused on sleep for years. John Pryor, a human resources executive at Southeastern Freight Lines, started working with FusionHealth in 2011 to test its truck drivers for sleep apnea. The company began covering the full cost of an athome test as well as a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine. FusionHealth can remotely detect whether drivers’ CPAP machines are leaking and report who is using the device.
Pryor says the company has seen a 24 per cent decrease in accidents involving those treated for sleep apnea since starting the programme.
Sleep has drawn the attention of employers because unlike mental health issues, “it’s not stigmatised”, says John Letter, president of Nox Health. “It’s an easier way to engage
One of the best things you could do is just have a culture where you don’t send emails at night
Clinical psychologist Kelly Baron
people about their overall health. Everyone wants to talk about sleep.”
Yet as the use of such tools or services grow, some employees may question their privacy.
Lee Tien, a senior staff lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says there are questions about the use of such health information. “What data is being collected? Who is it actually being shared with? Under what legal regimes are they being protected? If someone mishandles my information, what is my recourse?”
Meanwhile, research has shown that for some people, sleep trackers could lead to more anxiety. In 2017, researchers coined the word “orthosomnia” to refer to patients fixated on improving sleep data from wearables. With some people, says Kelly Baron, a clinical psychologist at the University of Utah, “it led them to engage in some behaviours that made their sleep worse.”
Sleep programmes might also seem like a Band-Aid to employees who ask why managers don’t just hire more people to trim workloads, or dump toxic managers to help alleviate sleep disruptions. And if late-night emails or off-hours conference calls are part of workplace culture, guidance to turn off phones early might ring hollow.
“One of the best things you could do is just have a culture where you don’t send emails at night,” says Baron, “or where you incentivise people [against] being glued to their laptops all the time.”