Researchers found workers who receive interventions to reduce the conflict between work and familial responsibilities tended to sleep an hour more each week and reported better sleep sufficiency than those who did not.
Researchers focused on a group of information technology firm employees and found a key link between a better work and home-life balance and better sleep quality, Elsevier Health Science reported.
"Increasing family-supportive supervision and employee control over work time benefited the sleep of hundreds of employees, and even greater effects may be possible if sleep is overtly addressed in workplace interventions," said lead author Ryan Olson of Oregon Health & Science University. "The Work, Family, and Health Network Study intervention was designed to reduce work-family conflict. It did not directly address sleep, yet sleep benefits were observed."
Randomly selected managers and employees participated in a three-month long intervention program that included interactive sessions and role-playing games. The assessments, which took place a year later, included qualitative interviews and actigraphy, which is a measurement of sleep quality using a wrist monitor.
This study demonstrates that interventions unrelated to sleep can improve sleep in the population. Furthermore, these findings serve as a reminder that there are opportunities to deploy innovative interventions to improve sleep," commented Dr. Lauren Hale, Editor-in-Chief of Sleep Health.
Following the study, the researchers created a statistical mediation model that factored in multiple temporal aspects of actigraphic sleep data, as well as the participants' personality traits and characteristics.
"Here we showed that an intervention focused on changing the workplace culture could increase the measured amount of sleep employees obtain, as well as their perception that their sleep was more sufficient," concluded lead investigator Orfeu M. Buxton, Pennsylvania State University. "Work can be a calling and inspirational, as well as a paycheck, but work should not be detrimental to health. It is possible to mitigate some of the deleterious effects of work by reducing work-family conflict, and improving sleep."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Sleep Health.
