As a researcher specializing in the correlation between sleep and work, I’ve found throughout my career, employers can benefit by addressing their employees’ sleep issues. Recent research indicates that as many as 25 percent to 30 percent of working adults suffer from insomnia.
Related: Does sleep improve business?
Historically, managers have viewed employee sleep as something outside of their control and none of their business. But a growing body of evidence indicates that insomnia undermines the health, well-being, and work effectiveness of employees.
Insomnia leads to high levels of absenteeism, poor moods at work, low job satisfaction, high levels of unethical behavior, uncivil behavior toward other employees, and other negative work-based outcomes.
Thus, insomnia is directly related to the bottom line for employers and addressing it is in the best interest of their company.
Fortunately, there is a large body of evidence supporting the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-I). CBT-I has multiple components intended to help employees change their behaviors and physiological state to help them get and stay asleep. Several medical studies show that using CBT-I helps to ameliorate insomnia, and that the beneficial effects of CBT-I persist long after the treatment is complete.
How can we help employees access this treatment in a scalable and cost-effective manner? CBT-I has historically required multiple in-person visits to specialists who can be expensive. Moreover, there are not enough qualified specialists to treat the vast numbers of people suffering from insomnia.
In response to this, multiple sleep medicine experts further refined CBT-I to be deployed online (such as digital insomnia treatment program Sleepio). Online versions are much cheaper, and can be scaled up indefinitely as compared to the in person version of CBT-I.
Recently, my colleagues and I posed the research question: Does treating those suffering from insomnia with online CBT-I influence work outcomes?
We conducted a field experiment in which 223 research participants were randomly assigned to a treatment condition (those who received online CBT-I through Sleepio during the course of the study) or a wait-list control group (those who did not get access to the treatment until after the study was complete).
Consistent with previous research, we found that online CBT-I not only had a beneficial effect on insomnia, but it also affected mood, job satisfaction, and self-control.
Moreover, CBT-I also benefitted organizational citizenship behavior (i.e., helping behavior at work) and discouraged counterproductive work behavior (i.e., negative behavior at work). In short, treating insomnia led to happier employees who enjoyed their job more, had better self-control, were more helpful at work, and less likely to engage in negative behaviors at work. The full study will appear in theJournal of Applied Psychology in early 2017.
This evidence indicates that there are clear benefits to work outcomes for treating insomnia. Thus, providing online CBT-I to employees not only leads to healthier and happier employees, but also more effective employees.
The potential payoff to employees is much greater than the small investment of tools like Sleepio, which is why it makes sense to include online CBT-I programs in employee benefits packages.
Benefits managers should of course carefully vet which program they choose, looking not only for procedures that comply with industry standards, but also evidence of effectiveness.
But properly vetted CBT-I programs should return far greater value than their expense. Moreover, providing such access sends a clear signal to employees that the organization cares about them, which provides additional intangible value.
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