Sleep and its effects on employees’ health in the workplace

During sleep, the human brain actively restores itself and repairs the body. So, with little or no sleep and therefore little or no restoration of the brain, the human body cannot function properly. Every day, we face events that can affect our sleep quality, not only at home but also at work. In “The interplay between poor sleep and work-related health” (Frontiers in Public Health, Occupational Health and Safety, July 7, 2022), Ingo Fietze, Lisa Rosenblum, Matthew Salanitro, Alexey Danilovich Ibatov, Marina Vladimirovna Eliseeva, Thomas Penzel, Désirée Brand, and Gerhard Westermayer explore work conditions that may affect not only our health but also our perceived sleep difficulties.

To conduct their analysis, Fietze and his colleagues use secondary data analysis of a survey dataset, gathered from 2003 to 2020, of 97 companies in Germany. Employees from these 97 companies were asked about different hazards within their work environment and whether they thought these conditions affected their health. Each survey contained 137 questions altogether, and 19,504 questionnaires were returned that included a response to the one question (and the topic of the article’s study) related to sleep problems. Of the employees surveyed, about 60 percent from each company completed the questionnaires.

Fietze and his coauthors look at four specific health indicators—joy of work, confidence, psychological impairments, and physical impairments—and compare them with the employees’ self-reported sleep difficulties. Of the employees who responded to the sleep question, about half reported some level of sleep problems, with the authors classifying about 50 percent of workers as “good sleepers” and about 25 percent as “poor sleepers.” In addition, the authors note that those who more often reported sleep problems at the moderate-to-severe levels were women age 50 or older. They also find that the employees who reported higher levels of sleeplessness worked mostly in the health and manufacturing industries. When comparing good sleepers with poor sleepers, the authors observe several differences. For example, the good sleepers were happy and confident and had higher levels of positive work health than those of poor sleepers. The poor sleepers, on the other hand, reported poorer work health because they had more impairments physically and mentally. The authors noted, too, that work demands could also affect sleep problems or conversely sleep problems could affect work.

The authors’ findings generally reveal that poor sleepers rated their health potential negatively and saw higher possibilities of work hazards (pressures of deadlines, physical strains, technology overload) than good sleepers did. Fietze and his colleagues contend that industries and different occupations could use these findings to improve work conditions and thereby improve the health of poor sleepers.