After several years of recognizing sleep’s role in productivity and controlling health care costs, some employers are actively giving employees tools to do something about it, taking advantage of new hardware and apps to affect behavioral changes.
One such example is New Balance, the Boston-based athletic shoe company, which rolled out a mobile app called Dayzz for its employees that offers personalized recommendations for better sleep.
As The Washington Post reports, while experts applaud the attention being paid to workers’ sleep, some raise questions about privacy or how useful sleep data, if it’s provided without context, will be for many employees.
“These devices can be great measurement tools,” says Michael Grandner, director of the Sleep and Health Research Program at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson, who has consulted for FitBit. “But then what do you do with that data?”
The shift is being fueled, at least in part, by a growing crop of hardware-like smartwatches, more individually tailored software applications and a greater focus on behavioral change. Other services connect workers with behavioral sleep experts.
Employer interest has risen as sleep science has improved, the World Health Organization has recognized burnout as an “occupational phenomenon,” and companies have become more focused on mental health, says Arianna Huffington, founder of the wellness company Thrive Global. “Anyone data-driven can no longer buy into the cultural stereotype that ‘we’ll sleep when we’re dead,’” she says. Read the full story.
