Getting paid to sleep - The US company that rewards employees for snoozing
Aetna insurance group pays staff up to $300 a year for sleeping sufficiently
- Various studies have confirmed that a lack of sleep undermines people's work performance
- Around half of the company's 25,000 workers are signed up to the scheme
Updated : 15:20
A good night's sleep (as well as coffee) is an important requirement for many of us as we try our best to make it through the working day. But for one US firm it's so important that they have started paying their employees more if they sleep more.
Insurance group Aetna have placed a premium on workers being active and enthusiastic in their jobs, so they encourage employees to sign up for their sleep scheme - which rewards them for getting at least 7 hours of sleep a night.
Insurance group Aetna have placed a premium on workers being active and enthusiastic
Staff involved in the programme earn $25 for ever 20 days that they sleep at least 7 hours, witht the maximum possible earnings set at $300 every year.
The scheme was introduced in 2009, and the numbers of participants in Aetna have risen quite dramatically since then, with 12,000 signed up.
Sleeping patterns can be recorded automatically by Aetna computers, or bosses seem to have enough faith to record theirs manually.
Kay Mooney, Aetna's vice-president of employee benefits, says that the sleep scheme is "one of many different healthy behaviours we wanted staff to track".
Aetna's commitment to ensuring that its workers get enough sleep comes as a number of studies warn that not sleeping long enough can significantly affect our ability to do our job.
A number of studies warn that not sleeping long enough can significantly affect our ability to do our job.
Some business heads have spoken up in recent days about the dangers of not getting enough sleep, notably founder and boss of the Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington, as she told BBC News.
"For many years I subscribed to a very flawed definition of success, buying into our collective delusion that burnout is the necessary price we must pay for success," said Huffington. "In terms of the traditional measures of success, which focuses on money and power, I was very successful."
"But I was not living a successful life by any sane definition of success. I knew something had to radically change, I could not go on that way."