A joint project by the National Safety Council (NSC) and Brigham Health and Harvard Medical School revealed a host of negative organizational outcomes resulting from fatigue related to sleep issues.[1] For example, if you run a Fortune 500 company, you will likely lose about $80 million this year due to absenteeism, impaired productivity and healthcare costs directly linked to fatigue.
This is a big scary figure. But if you reframe the problem as an opportunity, it gets really exciting. Instead of losing $80 million, look at it as an opportunity to make $80 million by addressing sleep-related fatigue issues.
Here are a 4 more positive reframes from the project’s findings:
- If you run a company with about 1,000 employees, you could make $1.4 million this year through decreased absenteeism, improved productivity and reduced healthcare costs by addressing sleep-related fatigue.
- For every person in your company with undiagnosed obstructive sleep apnea that you help get diagnosed and treated, you could make $3,000 per year.
- For every person in your company with untreated insomnia that you help get diagnosed and treated, you could make $2,000 per year.
- If you engage as little as 50% of your workers in a sleep health program, you will earn it back big time! This means about $40 million dollars more per year for an average Fortune 500!
To find out your return on investment (ROI) for fighting fatigue, plug your figures into the NSC’s Fatigue Cost Calculator [2]. It will only take you about 10 seconds to get your estimate. Be sure to try the ROI slider at the end of your report to see just how many employees you need to reach with your sleep health program to experience a financial gain.
Footnotes:
[1] National Safety Council: https://www.nsc.org/workplace/safety-topics/fatigue/fatigue-home.
[2] NSC’s Fatigue Cost Calculator https://www.nsc.org/forms/real-costs-of-fatigue-calculator