Calculator shows hidden costs of fatigued workforce 10-13

A Fatigue Cost Calculator reveals that a U.S. employer with 1,000 workers can lose about $1.4 million dollars annually due to costs associated with exhausted workers.

Sleep disorders and sleep deficiency are hidden costs that affect employers across the U.S. Seventy percent of Americans admit that they routinely get insufficient sleep, and 30 percent of U.S. workers and 44 percent of night-shift workers report sleeping less than six hours a night. In addition, an estimated 50 million–70 million people have a sleep disorder, often undiagnosed. In total, the costs attributable to sleep deficiency in the U.S. were estimated to exceed $410 billion in 2015, equivalent to 2.28 percent of the gross domestic product.

Analysis of existing data, using a new Fatigue Cost Calculator developed through the Sleep Matters Initiative at Brigham Health for the National Safety Council (NSC), reveal that a U.S. employer with 1,000 workers can lose about $1.4 million dollars each year in absenteeism, diminished productivity, health care costs, accidents, and other occupational costs associated with exhausted employees, many of whom have undiagnosed and untreated sleep disorders.

Introduced at the NSC Congress and Expo, the Fatigue Cost Calculator is free online. Employers can use it to determine how much money a tired workforce costs their business by entering specific data — including workforce size, industry, and location — to predict the prevalence of sleep deficiency and common sleep disorders among their employees. Using an algorithm generated by integrating information from sleep science literature and publicly available government data, the calculator can estimate both the prevalence of employee sleep deficiency and the resulting financial loss.

It also estimates the savings that might be expected from implementation of a sleep health education program that includes screening for untreated sleep disorders, such as obstructive sleep apnea and insomnia.

“We estimate that the costs of fatigue in an average-sized Fortune 500 company consisting of approximately 52,000 employees is about $80 million annually,” said Matthew Weaver, a scientist with the Brigham Health Sleep Matters Initiative who helped develop the calculator.

The mission of the Sleep Matters Initiative, led by investigators from Brigham Health and Harvard Medical School, is to improve treatment of sleep and circadian disorders in order to improve health, safety, and performance, and to promote change in social norms around sleep health.

“Promotion of healthy sleep is a win-win for both employers and employees, enhancing quality of life and longevity for workers while improving productivity and reducing health care costs for employers,” said Charles A. Czeisler, director of the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at Brigham and Women’s and Baldino Professor of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

“Additionally, occupational fatigue-management programs can increase knowledge of sleep disorders, educate participants on the impact of reduced alertness due to sleep deficiency, and teach fatigue countermeasures, as well as screen for untreated sleep disorders.”
Other findings revealed by the Fatigue Cost Calculator include:

• A national transportation company with 1,000 employees likely loses more than $600,000 a year because of tired employees. Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of workplace deaths, underscoring the need for alert, attentive employees.
• More than 250 employees at a 1,000-worker national construction company likely have sleep disorders, which increase the risk of being injured or killed on the job. The construction industry has the highest number of on-the-job deaths each year.

• A single employee with obstructive sleep apnea can cost an employer more than $3,000 a year in excess health care costs.

• An employee with untreated insomnia is present but not productive for more than 10 full days of work annually, and accounts for at least $2,000 in excess health care costs.

• An average Fortune 500 company could save nearly $40 million a year if half of its workforce engaged in a sleep-health program.

“This research reinforces that sleepless nights hurt everyone,” said Deborah A.P. Hersman, president and CEO off the National Safety Council. “Many of us have been conditioned to just power through our fatigue, but worker health and safety on the job are compromised when we don’t get the sleep we need. The calculator demonstrates that doing nothing to address fatigue costs employers a lot more than they think.”

Development of the Fatigue Cost Calculator was supported by a contract from the National Safety Council to the Brigham and Women’s Physicians Organization. 

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Recognize Intrapreneurs Before They Leave 10 -01

Recognize Intrapreneurs Before They Leave

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Image credit : Shyam's Imagination Library

by Vijay Govindarajan and Jatin Desai  |

Any CEO can tell you that finding ideas is not the always the problem. The real issue is selecting and spreading the best ideas, testing quickly, and executing flawlessly. An “innovation engine” is an organization’s capability to think and invest in long-term opportunities along with the competence to drive continuous innovations for top-line growth each year.

To build your innovation engine, your firm must excel at operationalizing ideas from your energized people who are willing to do everything they can to fight off internal resistance without creating chaos. This is your bench of corporate innovators: your intrapreneurs.

You already have natural intrapreneurs in your company. Some you know about, but most are hiding. These individuals are not always your top talent or the obvious rebels or mavericks. But theyare unique and certainly the opposite of “organization men.” When you find them and support them correctly, and magic will occur.

Intrapreneurs can transform an organization more quickly and effectively than others because they are self‐motivated free thinkers, masters at navigating around bureaucratic and political inertia.

In a firm with 5,000 employees, we’ve found, there are at least 250 natural innovators; of these at least 25 are great intrapreneurs who can build the next business for your firm.

Failed Leadership

Many senior leaders, surprisingly, are actually afraid to promote out-of‐ the‐box thinking for fear of losing their best employees to success and then to competitors; this is a sure sign of failed leadership.

Tomas Chamorro‐Premuzic argues that 70% of successful entrepreneurs got their business idea while working for a previous employer. These talented individuals left because the environment did not have an intrapreneurial process to pitch their ideas–and their bosses were unbearable. We find that smart people leave companies to start their own ventures because their firms did not believe in intrapreneurship as a critical tool for growth.

Successful Intrapreneurs

Based on our work with corporations, we have discovered six patterns of successful intrapreneurs:

Pattern #1: Money Is Not the Measurement. The primary motivation for intrapreneurs is influence with freedom. They want to be rewarded fairly, but money is not the starting point for them. Reward and compensation are a scorecard of how well they are playing the game of intrapreneurship.

Pattern #2: Strategic Scanning. Intrapreneurs are constantly thinking about what is next, one step into the future. These passionate change agents are highly engaged, very clear, and visibly consistent in their work and interactions. They are not sitting around waiting for the world to change; they’re figuring out which part of the world is about to change, and they will arrive just in time to leverage their new insights. Learning is like oxygen to them.

Pattern #3: Greenhousing. Intrapreneurs tend to contemplate the seed of an idea for days and weeks between calls, meetings, and conversation. As they shine more light on it, the idea becomes clearer, but they don’t yet share it. They know that others may dismiss it without fully appreciating it — so they tend to ideas in their greenhouse, protecting them for a while from potential naysayers.

Pattern #4: Visual Thinking. Visual thinking is a combination of brainstorming, mind mapping, and design thinking. Only after an exciting insight do intrapreneurs seem able to formulate and visualize a series of solutions in their head—rarely do they formulate just one solution. They do not act impulsively on a solution immediately, keenly aware of the need to honor the discovery phase for the new solution, giving it time to develop and crystallize.

Pattern #5: Pivoting. Pivoting is making a significant, often courageous, shift from the current strategic direction. It sounds scary and unfathomable to most mature organizations, although it’s often what is needed to resuscitate a dying company.

For example, Steve Jobs pivoted Apple from being an education and hobby computer company to a consumer electronics company. Wipro of India pivoted from being a small vegetable oil manufacturer to a software outsourcing powerhouse. CEO Tony Hsieh of Zappos pivoted from  selling only shoes to becoming an online customer experience company. (In 2009, Amazon bought Zappos for $1.2 billion.) Jeff Bezos pivoted Amazon from being the world’s largest online megamall that sold everybody else’s stuff to selling its own hardware—the Kindle line of readers. This strategy has paid off well—as of this writing, Amazon owns about 60% of the e-reader market share, and its market capitalization value is north of $100 billion.

Pattern #6: Authenticity and Integrity. The intrapreneurs we studied demonstrate the attributes of confidence and humility, not the maverick-like behavior often associated with successful corporate innovators. They all, however, exuded high self-awareness and sense of purpose.

You can begin a senior-level conversation about intrapreneurship by addressing the following important questions about building a bench of intrapreneurs:

• What is your organization’s definition of a corporate intrapreneur?

• How does one become a successful intrapreneur?

• How can you find intrapreneurs within and outside your company?

• What are methods and tactics to develop intrapreneurs and intrapreneurial teams? How can your organization implement them to nurture your intrapreneurs?

Successful companies with their own innovation engines understand how to find, develop, and retain intrapreneurs. In order to outcompete, they promote and nurture a small start‐up environment within a large organizational structure that embraces continuous experimentation to find the next big thing.

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To Buy Happiness, Purchase an Experience 08-10

To Buy Happiness, Purchase an Experience

Image credit : Shyam's Imagination Library

Michael Norton explains why spending money on new experiences yields more happiness than spending it on new products.

Conventional wisdom says that money can't buy happiness. Behavioral science begs to differ. In fact, research shows that money can make us happier—but only if we spend it in particular ways.

In their book Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending  , authors Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton draw on years of quantitative and qualitative research to explain how we can turn cash into contentment.

The key lies in adhering to five key principles: Buy Experiences (research shows that material purchases are less satisfying than vacations or concerts); Make it a Treat (limiting access to our favorite things will make us keep appreciating them); Buy Time (focusing on time over money yields wiser purchases); Pay Now, Consume Later (delayed consumption leads to increased enjoyment); and Invest in Others(spending money on other people makes us happier than spending it on ourselves).

In the following video, the first in a series, Norton doles out some cash to two women in Harvard Square on a sunny summer day. The catch: Each of them must take the money and spend it on an experience.

"One of the most common things people do with their money is get stuff," explains Norton, an associate professor of marketing at Harvard Business School. "But we have shown…in research that stuff isn't good for you. It doesn't make you unhappy, but it doesn't make you happy. But one thing that does make us happy is an experience."

Watch the video to find out why Norton believes that taking a trip yields more happiness than, say, buying a necklace—and to find out whether the women in Harvard Square end up happier.

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