Is infant sleep coaching the new benefit of choice for working parents?

We all know what it feels like to go to work on little or no sleep. It’s almost painful. You walk around all day in a fog, it can take concerted effort just to get up to make a cup of tea, never mind producing quality work or having effective meetings. As working parents, those foggy days are not unusual and, for many it becomes their norm. You adapt, you get used to it but without question it makes working life, or just life, tough. As a parent there will always be the odd night where a sick child keeps you up, but often the cause of an infant’s sleep issues can be remedied with professional advice, which means there’s an opportunity for businesses to help make a difference.

My two main goals when setting up Parent Cloud were to improve parental mental health and to help businesses to improve their gender diversity. I knew that by offering career coaching and access to therapists we were going to make a difference in these areas but I hadn’t realised quite how popular it would be to give our users access to Sleep Coaches. So far, this has been our most popular support service.

I received an email from one of our users last week who said that she had not had more than 3 straight hours of sleep for almost two years and that, having spoken to one of our specialists she had had four full nights’ sleep in a row. She was naturally over the moon, I could almost feel the renewed energy in her words.

It seems obvious, that by helping working parents’ children to sleep better, the increased sleep all round will naturally create happier and healthier working parents, but I wanted to look in to the science behind it to work out what typical impact this might have on a business. Here’s what I found out.

So, what does a good nights’ sleep actually do to your body and why does sleep deprivation have such an impact

A lack of sleep can have an impact on your employees in many ways. In one extensive review adults with a shorter night’s sleep were 55% more likely to become obese. The lack of sleep causes a hormone imbalance, heightening feelings of hunger and releasing insulin, leading to increased fat storage and a higher risk of Type 2 diabetes.

Sleep is also important for many aspects of brain function. This includes cognition, concentration, productivity and performance. All of these are negatively affected by sleep deprivation. There was an interesting study on a group of medical interns that suggested that those experiencing severe sleep deprivation made 36% more serious medical errors. Some even likened the difference to alcohol intoxication.

Mental health issues, such as depression, are strongly linked to poor sleep quality and sleeping disorders. It has been estimated that 90% of people with depression complain about sleep quality.

Even a small loss of sleep has been shown to impair immune function. One large study monitored the development of the common cold over a two-week period. They found that those who slept less than seven hours were almost three times more likely to develop a cold than those who slept eight hours or more.

Sleep deprivation can also have an impact on our level of motivation. A study in 2010 observed over 4,000 workers at four large corporations. Those categorised as having had insufficient sleep experienced the steepest productivity losses, spending nearly three times as much of their day on time management alone, they also saw a drop of approximately 18% in their level of motivation.

So unfortunately, working parents with children who are struggling to sleep are likely to be; less active, larger, more depressed, more unwell, less able to concentrate, less motivated and less productive. Wow. That doesn’t sound good. I don’t want this to become a reason to not hire Parents. Parents are also brilliantly empathetic, patient, multi-taskers too. If I used emojis (and I don’t) there would be a smiley face here.

On a more significant and slightly scary level, a Harvard study showed that some of the deadliest accidents in recent history could be related to sleep deprivation, including, the 1986 nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, the grounding of the Exxon Valdez, as well as the loss of the space shuttle challenger.

The numbers

A study in Germany, published in the Sleep Journal, found that parents of 0 to 6 year olds all felt the impact of sleep deprivation, losing, on average 30 mins sleep a night. This number is naturally higher for those with younger children but even a drop of 30 mins can have an impact on health, productivity and motivation. If we consider that last year there were 750,000 births in the UK then we can assume that there is likely to be approximately 4.5 million children between the ages of 0 to 6 in any given year. If you assume that most families have two children then this would mean there are 4.5 million Mums and Dads dealing with, on average, 30 mins less sleep than their childless peers. While these numbers are slightly crude and we could overlay parental employment it would suggest that approximately 14% of your workforce is operating under these pressures.

What is the impact on your business?

A 2016 study by the RAND Corporation found that because of sleep deprivation, the UK sustains losses of up to ￡38.5 billion, 1.86 per cent of its GDP. In the US fatigue-related productivity losses were estimated to cost $1967/employee annually. While these figures incorporate all individuals experiencing issues with sleep and can’t all be blamed on the advent of a child, parental sleep deprivation might well be something businesses can have a positive impact on. I reached out to our Sleep consultants to ask how many clients they consult with and are unable to help and the percentage was very small. This leads to the conclusion that most infant sleep issues are transitory and, therefore, easier to influence than perhaps the underlying mental health issues that cause sleep problems in adults.

HR & Management teams are starting to think creatively about how to have a positive impact on the lives of their employees, building eclectic, tailored benefits packages to meet a broad range of requirements and support their employees through a variety of pinch points in their lives. By giving working parents broad-based support in areas such as sleep coaching you can impact their health and happiness while also having a positive impact on business productivity and profitability. It’s a win, win.

Parent Cloud is helping to transform businesses by creating a workforce of healthier, happier parents. Through us, employees gain online consultation access to specialists in fields such as antenatal/birth/postnatal coaching, breastfeeding, nutrition, infant sleep, therapy sessions and career coaching. The result: increased employee engagement, improved mental wellbeing and more gender-inclusivity.

Sources:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ce42/7217e0dcf2e47b5af717ef4f2b986ee0f90b.pdf

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/26/parenthood-sleep-deprivation-after-birth-mothers-hit-hardest-research

https://www.hult.edu/blog/how-sleep-deprivation-affects-work-and-performance/

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/307334.php#effects

https://www.tuck.com/productivity-and-sleep/

https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/42/4/zsz015/5289255