A U.S. insurance company is paying workers to sleep more. Staff will get $300 a year extra if they sleep more than seven hours a night. This idea is to make employees work better. Human resources officials say employees work better if they sleep well. The company will then perform better. Staff can record their sleep automatically using a wrist monitor, or record how long they have slept every night.
Many studies show that not sleeping enough affects our ability to do our job. The average U.S. worker loses 11.3 working days of productivity a year because of not sleeping enough. The US economy loses $63.2 billion a year because of this. A study in Europe found that staff who slept less than seven hours per night did much less work than workers who had eight or more hours. Workers at Aetna also get extra pay if they exercise.
