The Best Way to Boost Sales Development Productivity: Sleep
5/4/2020
Comments
What sales development leaders need to know about the connection between sleep and productivity and how to get more of both. Even before the uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans were underslept. A large body of research shows we were quite unproductive as a result. During the current crisis, we face even more threats to both sleep and productivity: anxieties keep us up at night, while distractions working from home, burnout from a lack of boundaries between our professional and personal lives, and the cognitive overload of Zoom all curb our focus. Now, more than ever, it's imperative to understand the connection between sleep and productivity and invest in your team's rest. The Science of Productivity
There's a deep body of research on the negative effects of sleep deprivation on mental processing. The prefrontal cortex area of the brain, which directs what psychologists call "executive functioning", has been found to be particularly impaired by a lack of sleep. Problem solving, reasoning, organizing, inhibition, planning, and executing plans - processes essential to performing our jobs - are all the domain of the prefrontal cortex. It is true basic motor and visual skills decline when people are sleep deprived, but they do so not nearly to the same extent as these higher-order mental skills. And the more sleep deprived you are, the worse the consequences. This is the concept of Sleep Debt - how much sleep you miss, or owe your body, relative to your sleep need over the course of 14 plus days. The bigger the debt, the worse the impact on how you perform your job. Yet, when organizations think of ways to make their teams more productive, more regular sleep is rarely the answer. How Your Team's Sleep Debt Impacts Its Productivity The last 100 years of sleep science includes tens of thousands of studies on the direct impact of sleep debt on workplace performance, and the implications are becoming harder to ignore. Deloitte, the multinational professional services network, has escalated sleep deprivation to a "business issue", supporting the scientific community's findings that "people’s ability to learn, concentrate, and retain information is greatly impacted by how well-rested they are.” This remains the case regardless of remote work practices or the status of the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, rigorous academic research shows that sleep debt affects productivity in profound ways: ● Increases in cognitive lapses that reduce alertness and attention: Researchers found a 400% increase in mental lapses following one night of missed sleep - and the same result for participants who slept for 4 hours over the course of six nights. ● Increases in response times and increased errors in tasks that require sustained attention, especially under time pressure and as task duration lengthens. Research has tied sleep deprivation to an 11% increase in response times - equivalent to the increase you would see from someone with a 0.8 BAC (the threshold at which you're deemed legally impaired). ● Difficulty learning new information and acquiring new skills, with a decreased likelihood to revise and adapt strategies in response to failures. Researchers have found one night of sufficient sleep improves motor learning task speed by 20% and accuracy by 39%. ● Degradation of working memory: When you sleep at night, cerebrospinal fluid and slow-wave activity both help flush toxic, memory-impairing proteins from the brain. Research has found a 40% reduction in the ability to form new human memories under conditions of sleep deprivation. ● Fewer insights: Sleep, by restructuring new memory representations, facilitates the synthesis of your day. Researchers found 2x as many subjects gained insights after 8 hours of sleep than after wakefulness. ● More sick days: Sleeping less than 7 hours a night has been found to make you 300% more likely to catch the common cold. Direct costs due to sickness absence could decrease by up to 28% if a workforce gets sufficient sleep. Worse, sleep debt can have negative consequences for traits and habits that foster team collaboration and morale, including: ● Increased likelihood to use a negative tone of voice. Decreasing sleep debt by 8 hours reduces negative vocal emotions by up to 67%. ● Emotional irrationality: Sleep deprivation leads to a 60% amplification in emotional reactivity. ● Less empathy: Decreasing sleep debt by 8 hours increases empathic response by 30%. ● Difficulty reading emotions ● Increased risk taking ● Unethical behavior It’s actually possible to measure the productivity costs of sleep debt in dollars and cents. In an 8-month controlled trial we ran with a Fortune 200 sales team, sellers using Rise increased key activities as their sleep improved. Outbound calls increased by 50%, while overall revenue increased by 14%. When you assume roughly 70% of your salesforce is underslept, it's easy to see how fatigue-related productivity losses add up quickly. Why We Fail to Make the Connection Between Sleep Debt and Productivity So why don’t organizations prioritize sleep? Caffeine may be one reason, since we can use it to counteract low levels of wakefulness. But this use ultimately boomerangs, as caffeine negatively impacts that night's sleep, triggering a vicious cycle. The more insidious reason leaders don’t focus more on sleep debt is we as humans tend to underestimate just how underslept we are and how impaired our performance really is. Indeed, sleep researchers have wondered, if sleep is so important to our daily performance, then why don't we realize it? What they've found consistently is significantly sleep-deprived individuals repeatedly rate themselves subjectively as only moderately sleepy. In "Why Six Hours of Sleep Is As Bad As None At All" the author aptly describes the findings of seminal research: "Lack of sleep ... apparently tricks you into thinking you’re an office all-star. People who slept just six hours per night for two weeks functioned as poorly as if they’d gone without sleep for 48 hours—yet they thought they were performing at the top of their game." How to Improve Your Team's Productivity Through More Sleep The good news is some organizations appear to be changing their tune. Google and Goldman Sachs cover healthy sleep in employee trainings. Aetna actually pays its employees about a buck for every night they sleep seven to nine hours. We at Rise Science are seeing an uptick in companies prioritizing sleep for improved productivity outcomes. The even better news is that improving our sleep—and reaping the rewards for productivity—is in our control (unlike much of the current moment). Managers and other organizational leaders can encourage their teams to harness the benefits of regular sleep. Not sure where to start? Research shows that simply giving employees more control over their schedule, without even directly influencing their sleep, has lasting benefits. But there are also ways you can explicitly prioritize sleep for improved productivity outcomes. These fall into three main categories: awareness, environment, and behavior.
If all this sounds like a lot, consider the alternative: less focus, decreased memory and learning, irritability, and a cut to your bottom line. A lot is uncertain right now, but the need to run a business remains. If you’re looking for tools and tricks to stabilize your team’s productivity, why not start with the one that is a certainty? Sleep is the most important investment you can make. At Rise, we're committed to bringing you content that's 100% backed by science. To discuss, go deeper, or question any of the claims we make here, please get in touch: [email protected]. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffmkahn/ https://twitter.com/jfkahn Jeff Kahn is Co-Founder and CEO at Rise Science. Rise is the only app that delivers the real-world benefits of better sleep. Jeff and his Rise co-founder were the first to publish research on technology-enabled sleep behavior modification over a decade ago, and have recently completed the largest known study on sleep and real-world job performance across the NFL and sales teams. Jeff's research and work have been featured in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and The Wall Street Journal, and on ESPN, NBC, CBS, and Fox Sports. Jeff holds a B.S. in Health Systems Engineering and an M.S. in Engineering Design & Innovation from Northwestern University. |
Weekly Newsletter
Blog Archives
October 2024
August 2024
November 2023
September 2023
December 2022
November 2022
October 2022
September 2022
August 2022
July 2022
June 2022
May 2022
February 2022
January 2022
December 2021
November 2021
October 2021
September 2021
July 2021
June 2021
May 2021
February 2021
January 2021
October 2020
September 2020
June 2020
May 2020
April 2020
March 2020
January 2020
December 2019
November 2019
September 2019
August 2019
June 2019
May 2019
March 2019
February 2019
November 2018
October 2018
July 2018
April 2018
March 2018
February 2018
November 2017
October 2017
September 2017
June 2017
May 2017
April 2017
March 2017
February 2017
January 2017
September 2016
August 2016
May 2016
September 2015
March 2015
February 2015
January 2015
Categories
All
Book
Boost Sales
Career
Coaching
Cold Calling
Communities
Conference
COVID-19
Infographic
Job
Leaders
Leads
Management
Market
Outsourcing
Pandemic
Podcast
Psychographics
Sales Development
SDR
Seminar
Social Media
Team
Technology
Trade Shows
Training
Trends
Get the Best Boss Ever:
|