Eleanor Smith makes a good case for why employers should probably be encouraging employees to take naps.
I can already hear stick-up-the-butt anal retentives scoffing and snarling about it, but I think she’s 100% right. I just don’t expect facts, logic and common sense to easily penetrate corporate America.
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Dean:
As a manager for years and now a director at a major multinational corporation, I feel I can provide SOME level of the perspective of the “stick-up-the-butt, anal retentive” business person who is not interested in facts, logic or common sense.
I’m tempted to just go full sarcasm here, but since you started this discussion off with such a calm, reasoned and fair introduction, I will try to do the same.
One of my most difficult challenges on a day-to-day basis is to get people involved in critical group coordinated activities. Those may be meetings, or work sessions or simply a need to have something on my desk so I can provide decision-making data to my bosses on a moment’s notice. (For example, this morning I got an instant message from my boss saying he needed such information in 20 minutes.)
In my organization we have significant numbers of team members who are spread across four time zones. That means that when it is noon for one team member, it is 1:00, 2:00, 3:00 and 4:00 for others. That means that our effective “team play” time is roughly from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm Eastern time. During that period we need to have everyone active, engaged and able to respond to emails, instant messages or phone calls.
To put it bluntly, that is what we are paid to do.
I suppose if we were in an environment where everyone was on the same time zone you could coordinate activities around people taking afternoon naps. But in my situation it is hard enough to deal with fifteen minute breaks and the typical hour and a half lunch that people take (I typically eat at my desk and work through lunch).
If we were to introduce a 1 hour nap time for employees, our afternoons would most likely become impossible to navigate. Starting at noon eastern time and continuing through the rest of the day we would have a significant number of team members either at lunch or napping.
Frankly I am one of those people who could use an afternoon nap. I have a serious energy lag between about 2:00 and 3:00 every day. If I could take a nap then, that would be great. Of course that is 4:00 eastern time, which is typically when my bosses need end of day status info, and that’s 1:00 Pacific when folks on the Left coast are just coming back from lunch.
Again I will point out a very salient fact on this subject. As a corporation we pay people a salary and arrange work schedules so that people can both collaborate and do individual work. The main reason corporations PAY people to work is because it is assumed that they are being inconvenienced by the job. If people would do it for free that would be different. Pay scales incorporate some adjustments for the level of inconvenience people are put to. In my case I am expected to work nights, weekends, holidays, WHATEVER is necessary to get the job done, and I get paid a pretty good salary to do it. (Today, for example, I had to arrange a meeting at 6:00 am my time, meaning I was up at 4:00 am to get ready).
To call for employee provided nap time may sound like a reasonable thing to you, but if my company did that today I would have to push out all of my deliverables by weeks or months. That’s simply the impact it would have.
Of course that doesn’t even mention the secret, evil joy we managers get at making people suffer. That’s just a job perk.
I haven’t reviewed the literature, but I wonder how much of the research on the positive effects of napping has been done on modern Americans who don’t get enough nighttime sleep? If it has, napping may not be an absolute good, but may be good to the extent that it’s making up for nighttime sleep that we’re missing out on. If that’s true, I’m not sure the way I want to go is in encouraging most employers to allow employees to take naps. I think we’d be better off as a society if we all got more sleep at night, as that has been shown to have a number of beneficial effects too, and naps have a tendency to interfere with night sleep.
On a purely personal level, I’d be totally willing to forever give up my right to nap at work if they’d quit setting such unreasonable deadlines that I’m often still working at home on my laptop after midnight. I wouldn’t be so sleepy and unproductive if I could go to bed when I need to more often, and frankly, I don’t need *more* alterations to my life that further blur the distinction between times when I’m on duty and times when I’m not.
Huge differences among individuals. My father could take a 5-minute nap and wake up refreshed: in my case, a short nap leaves me feeling like hell.
I read somewhere that the FAA has banned controllers from taking naps *during their break time*…if this is really true, it sounds most unwise (unless there is actual research data supporting it)
Shh — I often nap at work. Don’t tell anyone.
HB
Sean: You should have read the link first.
Really, I can’t bother to respond to your comment until you make it obvious you have, you stick-up-the-butt corporate reactionary. ;-)
Hint: no one said an hour nap, and no one said you take one in addition to your break. But they did talk about measurable improvements in productivity based on far less than what you seem to assume.
Come on back and give us more commentary when you’ve read it. You stick-butt. ;-)
Elizabeth: My experience with worktime naps–on rare occasions where I been in an environment where I could take one–is that anything over 15-20 minutes is hazardous as it may leave you much more tired than if you hadn’t bothered in the first place. On the other hand, I’ve seen near-miraculous results from a 15 minute nap in myself and others, better than a whole pot of coffee and screaming loud music. Just suddenly, “Zip, hello! I’m back! Man I feel better! Oh my God, was my brain even working an hour ago?!?”
And I don’t -think- 10-20 minutes is going to interfere with most people’s sleep schedules; from what I can see, it looks like we’re naturally evolved to take short naps.
I utterly agree with you that not getting enough sleep at night is a huge problem, and probably *way* more of a drag on productivity than most “go go go, work work work no matter what it takes” employers really seem to even want to think about. Tired people make mistakes, tired people call in sick more often, tired people quit more often, tired people have worse attitude problems, tired people have more temper tantrums and freakouts, and tired people are more likely to go on shooting rampages.
(I’m only joking about the last part. I think.)
I, for one, if I were back in a standard office environment (I don’t work in one now, although we do have “an office”), would happily “trade” my 15 minute break for a quiet and dark place to just lay down and close my eyes–in other words, use my break for exactly that. I can drink the coffee at my desk.
I’ve also had experiences where burning my entire lunch hour taking a nap in my car just about saved my sanity, although, that’s much harder and yeah, a whole hour was usually dangerous as that sometimes left me having a hard time sleeping later and possibly more tired than if I hadn’t bothered. Probably something to do with how *deep* you sleep. Getting a few REMs is one thing, full blown sleep is another.
(You do get REMs in the lighter stages of sleep, right? Or am I misremembering and it’s that you get REMs in deep sleep?)
speaking purely for myself, whenever i’m in that zero energy state i often find a 5-10 minute walk and a few glasses of water really helps. i think habit has to be part of it, too. i always seem to get tired around 3pm – something that’s been more or less constant since high school.
Dean:
There was nothing at all in that article that gave nap times. The closest it came was in describing SOME naps as “short.” Where you get the idea that it is promoting 15 minute naps is as mysterious to me as you seem to find my assumption that it is promoting longer naps.
Everything I said about a one hour nap time applies just as well to a half-hour nap time. I find it hard to believe that most people would benefit from a fifteen minute nap because I simply don’t believe the average person can drop off and wake up that reliably. Most people have to prepare for a nap and I don’t know many people who fall asleep on cue. For most people I would guess it will take five or ten minutes or so for them to prepare to nap for fifteen, and it will take most of them at least another five or ten to recover from the nap sufficiently to be able to attend a meeting or perform a mentally demanding task. It is hard for me to believe that a fifteen minute “nap” can be accomplished reliably in less than thirty minutes.
Am I the ONLY one reading that article who is alarmed to learn that there is a kindergarten teacher who SLEEPS in their kindergarten class? How is this not egregiously irresponsible behavior? Who is WATCHING THE DAMN KIDS while she’s snoring blissfully away to make up for staying up watching “Weeds” the night before?
My points still stand. Call me old-fashioned, call me “stick-up-the-butt” call me whatever. My personal opinion is that instituting nap time in most corporate environments will simply provide another opportunity for people to abuse a privilege and the most dedicated and critical workers will continue to work through nap time just like I work through lunch.
Zach: I agree with you. My typical daily way to combat my mid-afternoon lethargy is to get up from my desk and go outside for a short walk. That is usually all it takes to get me mentally alert again.
I also find that taking a short break to write a blog entry also helps.
There is not much left of Corporate America for anyone to penetrate. One day in the not too distant future, you younger people, if you shall be employed at all for any gainful purpose, may well find yourselves working for small salaries for distant economically colonial masters in Beijing, Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, or Riyadh. It might be worth your time to find out how much even the most goodly-natured of those distant masters will pay you to snooze on your jobs paid with their nickels.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
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