Losing sleep? Calculator finds fatigue at work costs Indiana millions
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — A new report from the National Safety Council and Brigham and Women’s Hospital places Indiana at No. 8 on the list of most sleep-deprived states, and cites several million dollars in lost Indiana business productivity as a result.
The National Safety Council reports 43 percent of Americans obtain insufficient sleep (7-9 hours per night), and 76 percent of Americans report feeling tired at work. The organizations have come together to encourage employers to provide sleep screenings for their workers to increase workplace productivity and workplace safety.
“Showing up fatigued is showing up impaired to work,” said Deborah Hersman, National Safety Council president and CEO. “Just two hours less of sleep per night is like having a few beers. It’s really impairing if you don’t get enough rest. We all know it but we tend not to do anything about it.”
Hersman said, at best, a fatigued employee will doze off at a keyboard. At worst, drowsiness could cost a life.
“Shift workers, people who work overnights and people who work really long shifts, think firemen, police officers, people who work in the hospital, these individuals are extremely stressed,” Hersman said. “One of the most dangerous times of the day for them is the ride home.”
Hersman is the former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board and spoke from experience where employers have realized too late that their workers are exhausted.
“I’ve seen numerous crashes and events that involve fatalities and at any point in those investigations, employers would have said, ‘I wish we had those employees back,’ they wouldn’t have come in that day, or they would have called in sick if they didn’t have enough sleep,” she said.
To catch the attention of employers, the two organizations have came up with a “Fatigue Cost Calculator for Employers” that displays the lost productivity from exhausted employees. Employers input their state, industry, number of employees and types of shifts, and the statistical generator produces the total cost of absenteeism, lost productivity and health care expenses.
National Safety Council representatives said a Fortune 500 company could save $78 million dollars a year if they helped their employees get better sleep.
“Once the employers recognize the cost of fatigue, we’re hoping that that will give them motivation to provide sleep health education for the employees as well as sleep disorder screening,” said Dr. Charles Czeisler, a Harvard University professor and director of Brigham and Women’s Sleep Health Matters Initiative.
Szeisler said employee sleep disorder screening could ID sleep apnea in thousands of people who don’t yet know they have it. He said 80-90 percent of people with sleep apnea are undiagnosed.
“It just undermines the foundation of sleep if you can’t breathe and sleep at the same time,” he said. ” The cost of fatigue is insidious and many times people are not aware of the fact that they’re not functioning at their full potential.”
Szeisler said those who have put sleep screenings in place at work say they’re seeing benefits.
“People write and say, ‘after I got my sleep disorder diagnosed and treated my marriage is doing better, my family life, I’m able to spend more time with the kids.’ They just have more energy,” he said. “It really is something the employer can do as a gift to the employee to change their own lives.”