MENTAL HEALTH & WELLBEING
encouraging healthy sleep enables employees to stay healthy and productive while reducing stress-related illnesses, absences, and high turnover rates.
As an employer or manager, you should make employee sleep a priority because of the knock-on impact it can have. Just as something like stress or anxiety can contribute to poor sleep, so too can poor sleep affect our emotional, physical, and mental wellbeing. These problems resulting from tiredness can snowball further which can impact employees' work-life balance.
There are simple things that employers can do to support their employees’ sleep and, by extension, workplace health and safety. Workplace wellness programmes and initiatives are a good start. Encouraging regular exercise and the avoidance of caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol in the evenings can be effective ways to improve sleep.
“ENCOURAGING HEALTHY SLEEP ENABLES EMPLOYEES TO STAY PRODUCTIVE WHILE REDUCING STRESS-RELATED ILLNESSES, ABSENCES, AND HIGH TURNOVER RATES.”
If you really want to see the benefits of a well-rested workforce you will need to change how you and your employees think about sleep and work. Healthy sleep is achieved through a change in mindset in your organisation.
We all know when we should be getting more sleep, but work and other life commitments can get in the way of this. Where possible, you should implement
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flexible work schedules. Offer flexible hours and shift patterns that allow employees to get the sleep they need. This might include allowing workers to adjust their start and end times to accommodate their sleep patterns or those of their family members. Improvements in sleep rely on consistency. Empowering employees to establish a consistent sleep schedule and encouraging them to stick with it is much more likely to have a positive long-term impact on both your employees’ health and, in turn, your bottom line.
Set an expectation that employees should aim to get adequate rest. Employee attitudes can take time to change, and they often take convincing. Open and honest discussions with staff, changes to HR policies, and leading by example are excellent ways to show that you are committed to improving employee sleep. Ultimately, by prioritising employee sleep, you can improve workplace health and safety with the added benefit of improving efficiency and reducing healthcare costs, sicknesses and absenteeism, and turnover rates.
As with any major project, ensuring your team has the right tools and resources for the job is critical for success. Investing in sleep training is a great way to ensure your employees have the know-how to unlock the benefits of sleeping well. Sleep training highlights the importance of sleep while giving employees a practical understanding of how sleep works, what can affect it, and how to get a good night’s sleep.
Sleep Scotland, Britain’s oldest sleep charity and leading provider of sleep support, training, and resources in the UK, wants to change the conversation about sleep in the workplace. With 25 years of experience supporting thousands of people to get a good night’s sleep, and trusted by the NHS, Sleep Scotland is searching for businesses to join them in committing to making sleep a priority in the workplace.
www.bit.ly/HSsleep 25
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