How many hours did you sleep last night? Are you feeling rested? Do you feel sleep-deprived?
As I work with companies of every kind and size—the big, the small and the micro, and of the brick-and-mortar and new-age startup varieties—there is one common complaint I hear all around. The working Indian is not rested enough—not able to sleep as well as he, she or they did in the past. Something’s going totally wrong. India looks, sounds and feels sleep-deprived.
Productivity at the workplace is getting impacted in the bargain. Bad sleep means bad decisions. Bad sleep means the grouchy employee at work. Imagine unleashing this employee in the space of customer complaint management, or at your hotel reception desk to check-in equally grouchy guests who have not caught enough sleep. The combination would be lethal.
Just as corporate captains and business leaders are asking employees to work longer hours, not a single one is coming out to champion sleep. No leader is really coming out there and asking people to sleep more. Sleep seems to be a personal item that belongs to the employee. It is a ‘home item’. You sleep as long or little as you want. I, the employer, am not concerned.
Must the employer be concerned? Must the employer recruit sleep-specialists to coach employees on how to sleep better? Must your sleep hours and your pattern of sleep be the concern of your spouse and you alone? Is sleep affecting corporate productivity? Is lack of adequate sleep affecting overall health, sexual and reproductive health in particular, and eventually relationships? And are we addressing the sleep dragon adequately? Are we even acknowledging it as an issue? Is lack of sleep the new pandemic?
The boss is asking them to stay up late and work. Working through calls is becoming a norm and employees are asked to take calls at the oddest of hours. The buzz and the light of the forever-on blue screen is killing the desire to sleep. The competitive workplace ethos is telling you subliminally that if you don’t work as much as Basanti does, Basanti will go places and you will not. In the old days, when you left your place of work, work was done. In today’s post-Covid age of working from home,, work follows you wherever you go—in the office and home. There is just no difference between workspace and play-space. But when your sleep space becomes a workplace, trouble brews in your bed.
Employees are saying it out quietly to their therapists. Work never stops anymore.Your mind is forever alive to the reality of the workplace. You are not able to switch off like you used to. And those who are double-income families, with husband and wife working in similar spaces, the trouble doubles. You are hard at work in office, hard at work on the commute and hard at work at home. The weekend seems to be the only time when both try to recoup lost sleep. In many cases among the younger profiles, even this is difficult. The yen to party on the weekend bites many. You work hard; you party hard. In the bargain, it’s hard to sleep altogether.
The sleep data thrown up from the 3,600-size sample of employees is scary. The age groups explored are ironed out across working age segments ranging from 25 to 60. The average sleep these employees confess to have recorded daily over a one-month period is 5 hours 20 minutes against their desire for an 8-hour pattern.
A small number of them seemed to track their sleep patterns on fitness trackers (280). From this segment emerged richer data. Their awake-in-bed data is an average 20 percent of the total time in bed. The REM (rapid eye movement) period is 14 percent. Light sleep average is 49 percent. And deep sleep is all of 17 percent. You are in bed, but you are not asleep. And that’s a matter of worry. You can’t sleep even when in bed.
What’s troubling sleep? A recent exercise we undertook across a 3,600-strong sample in 12 work environments is telling. Employees are sleeping less across all verticals of work. People in sales and retail are sleeping less than anyone else. People in banking are sleeping less as well. Everyone with a work target defined for themselves is sleeping less. Everyone who has a salary linked to a variable remuneration pattern is sleeping that much less. The biggest item that is robbing sleep is this yen to achieve. While a bulk of it is boss-driven (67 percent), the balance (33 percent) is driven by the self-motivated and motivating employee. While the boss is ruining the sleep for some, in two thirds of the cases, the individual employee is robbing himself of sleep. The workplace today is competitive. Everyone is pitted against one another. The best of corporate workplaces who pride themselves to be ‘good’ and ‘great’ places to work, have the biggest of challenges. Employees probed for reasons why sleep eludes them as much as they need or want indicate a toxic workplace to be the prime reason that is poisoning their sleep.
Sleep is, therefore, a big industry ahead. Sleep therapists, sleep consultants and sleep gurus are the future of this large industry. As many working people, that many sleep deprived folks (at least 21 percent of them who are already acknowledging the fact that they are sleep challenged). Bengaluru has just joined an elite global tech club as one of the 12 cities with a tech workforce of more than 1 million people. By sheer extrapolative logic, sleep is a big industry in this city for sure. Literally, 0.21million of Bengalureans in the tech space are likely to be sleep-challenged. If not a pandemic, it sure sounds like an endemic. Whatever it is, is it not time all of us tackled the issue and held the sleep bull by its horns? Or does it just have one horn, like a ‘unicorn’? I’m not sure.
The industry of sleep is slated to boom. Expect every mattress company to come up with the ‘intelligent mattress’ that measures your sleep and puts you to sleep when you want. Expect the sleep apps to go berserk. Expect the sleep gummies market to boom. Sleep music is already a genre on its own. I have just checked into a hotel in Delhi and the hotel offers me a meditative playlist that promises to be soothing enough to put me to sleep. Will hotels offer a lullaby artist next? Hotels are offering sleepwear you can buy, made of fabric that promises to be so soft on your skin that it can lull you to sleep. Another hotel is offering a tapping exercise to “un-loud” your mind and help melt stress, whatever that means. Sleep is a big industry in a country deprived of it.
As I close, I must recall one sentence that has stayed in mind for three decades since I heard it first. It comes from our venerated N R Narayana Murthy, who is a personal icon of mine. It’s about a pillow. And a pillow is something that gets as close as it can to good sleep. I repeat his evocative words: “A clear conscience is the softest pillow in the world.” Is that the magic sauce for a good sleep? And is that what we are missing in our work lives? Touché!
Harish Bijoor
Brand Guru and Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults
(Views are personal)