Human Resources: Sleeping on the Job

I once knew an executive pay consultant who told me that he kept a note pad near his bed and that when he woke up thinking about a client´s compensation problem he would jot down the insights he had had while asleep. On waking, he would record his time and bill the client. I did not know what to make of this and I´m still not entirely sure. Perhaps he was on a ´dream quest´ to find his ´power animal´ to help unravel the problem of an under performing stock option plan. Perhaps the ´power animal´ was a rhinoceros known for having a thick skin and charging a lot.

I have since learned that the study of sleep and its relation to human productivity is no joke. The bulk of the research focuses on the impact of sleep deprivation, which can be a critical problem in jobs where public safety is at risk. We don´t want employees´ "asleep at the switch" when operating airplanes, trains and nuclear power plants. However, some of the research on sleep suggests the positive impact of napping on the job and the consolidating power of dreaming to increase both productivity and creativity.

What Science Says
Scientific studies, led by Dr. Robert Stickgold and others at Harvard University, have demonstrated that a combination of early slow-wave sleep and dreaming sleep, characterized by rapid eye movement (REM), reinforces memory. Furthermore, dreaming allows the mind to associate short- and long-term memories in order to consolidate learning acquired during the day. The familiar practice of staying up all night to cram for the exam has, in fact, a negative impact on results.

The studies also indicate that dreaming allows people to associate older familiar thoughts in new ways when connected in the sometimes irrational space of unlike elements in the dream state. It interests me to reflect that this joining of unlikely elements is both the definition of both new learning and the poetic device of metaphor. I guess the old adage of solving a problem by ´sleeping on it´ may be correct after all.

The experimental evidence on napping, not just resting the eyes, is the most interesting. A series of visual discrimination tests were conducted with 129 under-graduates at Harvard. They were asked to rapidly identify shapes and letters flashed on a screen for an hour four times a day. Those who had both slow-wave and REM sleep at night after the first day of the experiment showed marked improvement on the recognition task on the second day. Overall results were better for measures of productivity, alertness and mood.

The theory behind the research is that the brain needs to erase the black board or get back to tabula rasa - a concept of the mind first suggested by the empiricist philosopher John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Locke regarded the mind of a person at birth as a blank slate upon which experience imprinted knowledge.

The basic idea in brain neurology is that one nerve cell connects to as many as 300,000 other neurons. A complex multi-circuit of inter-connections is being created and recreated through stimulation in the environment all the time. The body needs to protect us from an overheated brain or burn-out that might short-out other important activity like breathing.

Sleep may be a way of associating, organizing and maintaining vital connections in the brain while off-loading what is not needed immediately into long-term memory to protect the mind from information explosion-this sounds a bit like RAM and the hard drive on your computer.

Playing Catch-up on Leisure
All of this research has given impetus to a small but persistent movement encouraging sleeping at work as a way of increasing productivity. The hard evidence is the impact of sleep deprivation. The National Sleep Foundation in the US estimates a cost to the economy of $18 billion a year in lost productivity. Informal surveys indicate that napping at work is a clandestine activity anyway. Supporters of the movement would have employers help get napping employees to come out of the water closet. An example of this leading-edge thinking is the Pittsburgh office of Deloitte Consulting. The Managing Director has installed a nap room on the premises. I sincerely hope that nap room is also supplied with milk and graham crackers. Why not? For many in the work place, this may me the best way to put back some of the leisure lost due to the pace of work in the 90s.

I thought you might like to think about this and hope my amateur discussion of the brain did not put you to sleep. Why not write me if you have something to add. I will be back to you again in August.