Sleep – high priority or necessary indulgence?
Recently I had a coaching client who works for a large institution in the City of London. In discussing his working life we explored some quite remarkable but not unusual working practices that I would like to comment on in this blog.
Before I go any further I would like to pose a simple question – if your lawyer, accountant or other corporate advisor was working for you whilst over the drink/drive limit for alcohol, what would you think?
I imagine the answer for most of you would be along the lines that you would be pretty appalled and would want him or her off the job. Let me enquire further – what would you do if you knew your advisor was chronically sleep deprived through the work schedule he or she was engaged in? I imagine most of you would probably accept that as a fact of life in the cut and thrust business world. Working long hours is, after all, part of the culture and if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen!
Yet research shows that drivers who are sleep deprived are just as dangerous as drunk drivers! We can reasonably generalise that comparison across into working situations. Both conditions – inebriation and sleep deprivation – compromise the ability to concentrate, make decisions and respond to emerging situations. As I have mentioned in a previous blog – the Challenger space shuttle disaster, the Chernobyl nuclear accident and the Exxon Valdez oil spill were all significantly caused by poor decision making by sleep deprived people.
Let’s go back to my client. He told me that whilst working on a major corporate deal he was getting a taxi into work at 8:30 in the morning, working all day and then leaving the office at about 3am the following morning. In other words, when you factor in travel, ablutions etc, this person was perhaps getting perhaps three and a half hours sleep per night, five days on the trot. The hazards of such working practices are self-evident yet such practices are not uncommon. Let’s remember that sleep deprivation is actually used as an interrogation tool due to the impact that it has on the victim’s cognitive functions. Personally, I would not want someone so fatigued feeding my goldfish let alone writing crucial paperwork for multi-million pound transactions.
In the modern business culture sleep and what we could call ‘downtime’ are often the first things go be sacrificed in the mistaken belief that they represent unproductive time. At Watt Works we believe this to be a tragically false economy.
On our Working Patterns for Maximum Efficiency courses we look at how modern business culture has evolved in ways that disconnect us from vital biological patterns and needs and how such a disconnect has multiple, unseen (and therefore easily ignored) costs. We look at a number of simple ways in which corporate cultures can be subtly re-shaped to harmonise more with such fundamental patterns and how businesses and their staff can benefit hugely from the ensuing results.
Our Working Patterns for Maximum Efficiency course is available in-house and also at our training venues in London, Cheshire and Belfast.
Tags: high-performance, Performance Enhancement, performance management
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