Sleeping on the Job

It may sound improbable, but naps--siestas, forty winks, daytime
dozes--are hot. Books like The Art of Napping (Larson Publications, 1998)
and Power Sleep (Villard, 1998) sold briskly. A number of companies
incorporated napping facilities into their workplaces, and some airlines
and trucking companies started allowing supervised siestas.

But anyone who thinks these initiatives represent a kinder, gentler
corporate response to employees' needs should wake up and smell the
coffee. They're strictly about the bottom line: reduced productivity due
to sleep deprivation is estimated to cost U.S. businesses $18 billion a
year.

So the sudden vogue for dozing is not an endorsement of an
unhurried OId World lifestyle, but a very American effort to get
employees to work harder and more productively once they wake up (power
sleep, indeed). The supervisors who are instituting the new napping
policies relied on studies that show greater alertness, faster reaction
times, better problem-solving and increased creativity in well-rested
workers.

The experience of one California consulting firm suggests yet
another economic benefit of allowing workers to sleep on the job. Since
it set up a nap room in 1996, in two years its expenditures on
caffeinated soda and coffee have dropped 30 percent.