Employees in UK Face Sleep Deprivation Due to Work
On the basis of a survey compiled by insurer RSA and YouGov, based on 2,100 employees, almost 8.5 million Brits were victims of sleep deprivation in the previous year. The problem is being attributed to the economic recession which forced companies to ask employees to put in long hours at work. To worsen the situation, employees were also worried about their work when home. The RSA has aptly named the phenomenon WAWAW which is short for ‘wide awake worrying about work’.
Almost 62% of the workforce surveyed who could not sleep due to anxiety and fears associated with their work related stress, complained of losing almost 3 hours of sleep at night. 53%, among the people who face sleep deprivation, said that they are required to put in longer hours at work or are getting up at odd hours at night due to their work-related concerns. The study revealed the fact that men were more anxious about their work and career (62%), as compared with women and thus faced a greater degree of sleeplessness and related problems.
60% of those employees who are in well paying specialized jobs are especially afflicted due to work tension and they are unhappy about the fact that it is affecting their sleep at night.
RSA casualty director Phil Bell opines that the survey reveals that the fear of losing the job is responsible for creating such a negative impact on the people that they are burdened with work anxieties even when they leave for home each day. This anxiety and fear is hindering the restful sleep at night.
Sleeplessness renders a person inattentive and makes him lose focus easily. This means that such an employee is less capable of handling unforeseen contingencies, which is a fact that employers must comprehend and acknowledge. It is as a result of this fact that more mishaps and blunders occur at the place of work.
8 out of every 10 employees who do not get the prescribed 7.25 hours of sleep at night fail to bring their problems to their superiors at work. This is in spite of the fact that two of five employees believed that sleep deprivation affected their performance adversely.
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