Paid for Sleeping

A company in the USA is paying its employees to sleep more. Staff at the insurance company Aetna will get $300 a year added to their salary if they get at least seven hours of sleep a night. That works out to just over an extra dollar for each night an employee sleeps more than seven hours. The idea behind this scheme is employee performance. Human resources officials say employees will work better if they have slept well. They add that a more awake and alert workforce will help the company perform better. Staff can either record their sleep automatically using a wrist monitor that connects to Aetna's computers or manually record how long they slept each night. There are a number of studies that warn that not sleeping enough can affect our ability to do our job. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine says that the average worker in the USA loses 11.3 working days of productivity a year because of not getting enough sleep. This costs a company about $2,280 per worker. It is estimated that the US economy loses $63.2 billion a year because workers do not sleep more than seven hours a night.