The NBA Workplace Leverages Sleep Tech — Now Your Office Can Too!

To perform well, you must sleep well.

To produce well, you must sleep well.

To reduce accidents/errors, you must sleep well.

Poor sleep impairs workplace performance and productivity. And poor sleep impacts a shocking number. Businesses can only fully optimize the workforce when collective sleep quality improves.

What gets measured gets managed. What gets managed gets done. So goes the saying attributed to Peter Drucker.

Now you can measure — and therefore manage — the sleep performance of your workplace to drive optimization.

My custom interface with Oura sleep data (other wearables in process) provides you a dashboard of key sleep metrics. You get your teams collective sleep performance, they retain their privacy. The service includes my training and experience to support individuals needing assistance to get better sleep.

During Covid-19, staying home when sick elevated to a key public health step. Oura provides temperature deviation. Now, temp check alerts can be issued upon awakening for team members who may be at risk for fever.

With this technology — and my support — you can deliver improved health to your team and your bottom line. A Win Win.

Your New Team Sleep Performance Dashboard

You can now see your teams collected performance in a variety of areas. Below are the standard issue graphs. We can build others upon request.

Total Sleep

Pretty straight forward. The average of total sleep hours for your team.

Sleep Score

Oura, and others, use algorithms weighing many metrics in addition to total sleep for computing an overall assessment of the night.

Number of People With Less Than 6 hours of Total Sleep

Six hours is a common threshold of inadequate sleep. Less than that spells danger. Here we count the number of people each day who come in under 6.

Number of People with Elevated Body Temperature

While not diagnostic, if a change over your baseline body temperature approaches 1 degree F, I would recommend using a normal thermometer to check for fever — and the people that populate this chart will receive an email alert.

I’ve had one fever in the last few years, and for the week my Oura clued me into the situation. If you see this metric growing for your team, action may be required.

Steps

Steps are an indicator of physical activity. Physical activity correlates to good health. Increased physical activity also leads to better sleep.

With this collated data, you can see if your team is moving. Maybe even a team lunch for a month averaging over 10,000 steps?

Why This Drives Health, Happiness, and Performance

First, the simple act of using Oura (and similar sleep tracking wearables) creates profound real time feedback on how daily activities affect sleep. Eating too much/too late wrecks sleep. Too much alcohol, too close to bed wrecks sleep. Bright light/screen time too close to bed, wrecks sleep. And those are just tips of the iceberg.

I’ve read a ton of books, tried two tons of supplements. But nothing has been more impactful to health and performance than implementing what Oura shows me.

Now, as an employer, you can help foster this improvement. And improve workplace morale and performance along the way. The research recommends action at the employer level. See below:

Stats & Insights Supporting Action at the Corporate Level¹

Employers — Recognize the importance of sleep and the employer’s role in its promotion
if corporations want to make more money, they could begin by encouraging good sleep practices around the workplace.
And it is not only the corporations who beneﬁt. Economists Matthew Gibson and Jeffrey Shrader found that folks who get enough sleep could increase their earning potential by up to 4.5%. —
Occupationally based sleep health education and sleep disorder screening programs have been shown to reduce fatigue costs by improving the sleep, performance, health and safety of the workforce.
“With 15 to 20 per cent of people suffering from moderate to severe sleep disorder, this type of program provides a secure and conﬁdential solution to get employees the help they need.”
One Japanese company, Crazy INC, is ﬁghting the problem by paying their employees with cafeteria points to get at least 6 hours of sleep each night, ﬁve days a week. This is worth $540 a year.
Aetna is another company that is paying its employees to get sufﬁcient rest. The brand’s CEO and chairman, Mark Bertolini, said they are willing to pay their workers up to 500 dollars a year to get enough sleep.
Missed days of work • Diminished performance and lower workplace productivity • Increased health care expenditures for illnesses and treatment of multiple associated health conditions • Workplace accidents and occupational injuries • Motor vehicle crashes
Writing in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, the researchers estimated that lost productivity due to poor sleep cost $3,156 per employee with insomnia and averaged about $2,500 for those with less severe sleep problems. Across the four companies, sleep-related reductions in productivity cost $54 million a year. This doesn’t include the cost of absenteeism–those with insomnia missed work an extra five days a year compared to good sleepers.
Insomnia may be responsible for over $63 billion in absenteeism and presenteeism, and accidents and errors by people suffering from insomnia may result in an additional $31 billion lost annually.
Individuals with insomnia were estimated to cost business an excess of 11.3 workdays each year in presenteeism
Insomnia is estimated to cost U.S. businesses more than $63 billion in absenteeism and reduced workplace productivity,4 with accidents and occupational injuries adding up to $31 billion lost annually.
Collectively, costs attributable to sleep deficiency in the U.S. exceeded $410 billion in 2015, equivalent to 2.28% of gross domestic product.7
70% of Americans admitting that they routinely get insufficient sleep.
An estimated 50–70 million people have a sleep disorder.
Institute of Medicine recognized the health and safety consequences of sleep deficiency and labeled the issue “an unmet public health problem,” arguing that 20% of serious crash injuries and hundreds of billions of dollars in medical costs each year can be attributed to sleep deficiency.3
undiagnosed sleep apnea in the U.S. costs society $150 billion each year
Overall, 30% of civilian employed U.S. adults (approximately 40.6 million workers) report an average sleep duration of less than six hours per day.
34.8% of Americans are sleep deficient
it is estimated that each individual with insomnia costs employers $985 each year in absenteeism.
survey concluded that $59.8 billion was being lost as a result of decreased productivity due to insomnia, a sum that would be worth $66.8 billion in 2017 dollars
Using national average wage information in June 2017 dollars, each person with insomnia would be expected to be responsible for approximately $2,548 in lost productivity costs each year.
The RAND Corporation estimates that individuals who sleep less than six hours each night on average lose six full work days of productivity each year, while those who sleep six to seven hours on average lose 3.7 work days annually compared to workers who obtain sufficient sleep.
we expect that individuals with insomnia generate $2,246 in excess healthcare costs annually.
Fatigue-related productivity losses were estimated to cost $1967/employee annually. Conclusions: Sleep disturbances contribute to decreased employee productivity at a high cost to employers.
Lack of sleep costing US economy up to $411 billion per year
Sleep deprivation increases the risk of mortality by 13 per cent and leads to the U.S. losing around 1.2 million working days a year. Increasing nightly sleep from under six hours to between six and seven hours could add $226.4 billion to the U.S. economy.
A person who sleeps on average less than six hours a night has a 13 percent higher mortality risk than someone sleeping between seven and nine hours,
Less Sleep Means Reduced Productivity According to the Center for Disease Control 1 in 3 adults do not get enough sleep. In that statistic, some 35% of employed respondents reported they did not get enough sleep. — [2] Centers for Disease Control and Prevention What could be the cause of this and how does it affect the average worker and their employer? “On an average day in 2017, 24 percent of full-time employed workers spent some time working while at home. The share of full-time employed workers performing work at home rose from 18 percent per day in 2003 to 24 percent in 2009, and remained relatively ﬂat from 2009 to 2017.” [3] Bureau of Labor and Statistics A recent study published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology surveyed 699 USDA Forest Service Workers and found, “People who tend to linger on bad or stressful work experiences outside of working hours report more frequent insomnia than those who can successfully shut off these bothersome thoughts.” [4] Medical News Today “A study of 7,428 participants concluded that sleep deprivation and insomnia cost employers $2,280 annually per employee.”
“Investigators have ruled that sleep deprivation was a signiﬁcant factor in the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, as well as the 1986 nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl.”
“Less productive employees to say: A 2017 study published in the American Journal of Health Promotion discovered that employees who sleep less than or more than 8 hours per night had more daytime fatigue, less productivity, and more absenteeism from work.”
“Sleep deprivation… leads to the U.S. losing around 1.2 million working days a year.”
“These proportions are higher than for any other chronic condition, with annualized US population projections of 274,000 costly insomnia-related workplace accidents and errors having a combined value of US $31.1 billion.”

Let’s Get Started

I agree, we should help your employees get better sleep.

The process is simple.

Costs

I am throwing this custom interface as an included feature for Tiers 2-4. A deal for sure. Plus, they get one-on-one support for sleep improvement — from a Doctor of Pharmacy / Certified Human Potential Coach / Oura & Sleep Health Junkie. Here is a free eBook I put together on sleep to see some of the common support areas we start with.

I don’t sell Oura rings, you can check them out here. How you decide to help employees get into these rings is up to you — an employee benefit, gifted at the end of the year of service, etc.

Then, I encourage budgeting an incentive program. Meals for activity benchmarks. Awards for positive trajectory. Maybe a budget for recommended supplements. You get the picture.

Using the numbers above, sleep challenged employees are costing around $3k per year. Investing $300 in a ring and $200 in my service with coaching get you to $500. That leaves $2500 you can meter out as incentives to drive improvements and performance to business metrics critical in your business.

Your customers will love interacting with well-rested employees.

Other sleep tech

While I think Oura is fantastic, other wearables can work too. The fully automated interface I have is with Oura. But, I can import data manually if the employee provides a spreadsheet from the other service. Since this is manual, tier 3 or 4 is required. Further, this would only be monthly. So, the live dashboard won’t keep up with your non-Oura staff during the month.

Good news though, I am working on FitBit and Garmin now. I don’t have an ETA, but an automated should be on the horizon.

I’m Ready

Great! Shoot me a message here and I will get your company dashboard configured. You made an excellent choice for your team, customers, and bottom line.

In the meantime, after deciding on which Tier to provide, you can register your staff via these links: