More sleep + less work = better business results

All too often, workplaces have a toxic culture that expects less sleep + more work = better business results. The opposite equation is one I talk about often – from conference stages to company board rooms – which may seem counter-intuitive at first. More than talk, I built my last startup around the premise that team members shouldn't set an alarm, and should work whenever they want.

You can read more about those principles in the handbook I created for that business, but this article is not about that business. This article is designed to highlight important examples, research, and statistics which reinforce reasons to adopt similar ways of working for greater degrees of success.

The leadership philosophy of having people work when at their best isn't just one that keeps people happy and healthy. It's an economic weapon; it's a competitive advantage in the race to attract the best talent and deliver better outcomes.

More sleep

“Sleep is the single most effective thing you can do to reset your brain and body,” says Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California. From the same article, the author concedes: "scientists are learning that shortchanging sleep can compromise nearly every major body system, from the brain to the heart to the immune system, making our inability – or unwillingness – to sleep enough one of the unhealthiest things we can do."

Seemingly ignored by big business and early stage startups alike, study upon study has shown that poor sleep impairs learning and memory, while contributing to the depression of mind and immune system.

Like with most rules, some exceptions exist. There are people who can commit to surprisingly short periods of sleep without a large measurable detriment. That said, you are almost certainly not one of them - even if you think you are. For every 100 people who believe they are part of a "sleepless elite" – being someone who can get less than 6 hours of sleep each night and perform at their best – 97 to 99% of people aren't. Instead, they are involved in the practice of self-harm. Their health, and their full potential, is at stake.

Thankfully, anecdotal understanding and objective hard science isn't being ignored by everyone. Aetna, a US-based healthcare company, pays its workers up to $500 a year if they sleep at least 7 hours for 20 days running. Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, stands by his claim that getting 8 hours of sleep each night is good for Amazon shareholders. Dave Asprey, the creator of Bulletproof Coffee, reiterates this sentiment by saying that starting work at 10 a.m. doesn’t make you a bad person. He cites researcher Michael Breus' chronotype categorisations, which describes the largely genetically-driven factors that make some of us early birds, some of us night owls, and others somewhere in the middle.

Less work

Whether you take the time and make the effort to get the appropriate amount of rest, this only paints part of your 'productivity picture'. Becoming increasingly understood is that we've only got four hours to do our best work each day – it's just that your "best" varies greatly, depending on the quality of your sleep. After about four hours, the quality of your ideas and the time it takes to execute them slide into comparative oblivion.

Anders Ericsson, professor of psychology at Florida State University is no stranger to this topic, who is one of the world’s leading researchers into the psychological nature of human performance. Ericsson has carried out many experiments demonstrating that people can only commit themselves to just four or five hours of concentrated work at a time before their productivity levels are significantly compromised.

While researching his recent book, "Peak: How All of Us Can Achieve Extraordinary", Ericsson studied how Nobel Prize-winning authors managed their time. He found that they spent just four hours a day writing on average. The 'productivity cliff' is a steep one, and many hours are wasted outside of our 'zone'. This pattern of focused work in short bursts is also reflected in the schedules of successful musicians and athletes.

With big corporates being beacons of stability, and startups being champions of innovative operations, you would think both categories of businesses would strive to be the first to do make their workplace environment more sustainable and more desirable. Instead, many continue to venerate overwork, hopelessly. I specifically say hopelessly because managers can't even tell the difference between staff really working 80 hours, and those pretending to.

Overwork is not just a recipe for employee churn and poor quality outputs, however. If it wasn't also clear in the consequences of poor sleep, overwork is a recipe for the erosion of positive culture, and even increasing the number of sick days taken due its affect on health. A Stanford University meta-analysis of 228 studies showed that high job demands raise the odds of physician-diagnosed illness by 35% and long working hours increase mortality by nearly 20%.

Thankfully, company leaders have been starting to pay attention and begin experimenting with the reduction of office hours. Employees of Basecamp (formally 37signals) work four-day, 32-hour weeks for 6 months of the year. Jason Fried, the company's founder, author of "Rework" (one of the most important business book I've ever read) and "Remote", has said that when employees have a compressed work week, they are better at prioritising and have reported that the quality of their work improves.

You might ask, "if we're taking all this extra time for sleep and we're only getting 4 hours of efficient, high quality work done, how will we get the entirety of our work done?" Don't fret, because the Swedish aren't. They've just lowered their work day to 6 hours and are seeing impressive productivity gains because of it. People are getting the same amount of work done, although importantly, they're happier doing it than before.

Better business results

The RAND Corporation recently published a study that calculated the business loss of poor sleep. In the United States alone, it was $411 billion — a total GDP loss gross domestic product of 2.28%. Regarding work itself, another recent study found that employee burnout is responsible for up to 50% of all attrition.

Ultimately, happier teams do better work. About 12% better, in fact. Sleep is a profoundly important ingredient for happiness, mental well being, and knock-on successes. It's a prerequisite for improving quality and productivity capacity, and a necessity for the kind of design thinking that can change paradigms - even if working fewer hours.

To succeed into the future, companies will not merely need the biggest teams or teams willing to work the longest hours. The companies that thrive will be the ones who adapt to cultural exceptions and their benefits. These companies will be the ones that do the best job of keeping people happy and create environments where people can do their best work, for the best company gains.