By Lucia Mabasa
Do you nap at work? Do you allow others to nap? If the answer to both questions is no, then perhaps you need to rethink it, because just like working from home, taking a kip in the middle of the workday is more than just a fad pioneered in Silicon Valley, but one that is increasingly gaining traction here in South Africa.
We’re not talking about letting people kick off their shoes and put their feet up on the desk to lean back in their chairs with their phones on silent, but the whole nine yards — dedicated rest areas with bespoke sleep pods in some companies.
There is a plenty of science backing it up, from studies showing increased productivity, enhanced memory, better learning and sustained high performance to improved moods and reduced stress levels by letting staff recharge, literally on the job.
The phenomenon neatly dovetails with the current post COVID push for employee wellness; but are South African companies ready for it? What happens if you are a CEO like me who doesn’t believe in taking a power nap, but soldiers on till you get back home at night? What happens if you have people working from home, who go offline to take their 40 winks? Perhaps most of all, how much of a nap is allowed during working hours? When does taking a nap become taking the company for a ride?
It’s a brand-new frontier to consider in a workplace that has often descended into a warzone as managers try to trudge through the shifting sands of how people work, where they work, when they work and even why they work.
But it isn’t new, when you think of some of the changing norms that corporate leaders have had to contend with over the last 30 years from dress codes to body art and parental responsibility leave. The answer to them all is to codify the issue and the behaviour expected of the employee and allowed by the employer.
Without a policy in place, there is no way to ensure a consistent response and, most importantly, fairness.
Companies must agree whether they are going to lean into the phenomenon of sleeping on the job, literally, or ban it outright. Some sectors would make this totally unfeasible, such as operating heavy machinery or performing surgery, but others would be able to accommodate a power nap with little disruption to the workflow.
Companies have a lot of latitude available if they codify their decisions in policies, manage them accordingly and deal with non-compliance promptly. Productivity should be monitored and tracked to justify the naps.
Times change and we must change with them as managers. 30 years ago, people could smoke at their desks, irrespective of what non-smokers felt. Then companies created designated smoking rooms where people who wanted a puff could feed their cravings – and then that was outlawed too and smokers had to physically get up and leave the actual office to smoke outside.
Smoking is massively disruptive, to say nothing about what it does to your health, but smokers still enjoy the right to smoke at work in most companies, but what happens if some employees take too much time smoking or take too many smoke breaks? In 2017, a Japanese company started giving its non-smoking staff six extra days of leave a year to compensate them for the time their smoking colleagues were taking. In 2020, a British company gave non-smokers four extra days a year in the same vein: rewarding non-smokers rather than punishing smokers.
Maybe we could see the same in South Africa? After all, if a power nap is 30 minutes a day, that’s 10 hours in a four-week month – or almost three weeks in time off by the end of December if you start in January.
The best way of all – and the fairest way – is to do it based on performance. It is exactly how all of us as business leaders have had to navigate the increasingly contested space of remote versus office work. If a staff member can prove that they work well on their own - and the job that they do allows them that latitude – and in the process they meet the expectations that they have been given, they are less likely to be policed. It is precisely when a person is under-performing that their entire conduct is scrutinized – from taking smoke breaks to power naps, coming to work late and leaving early, pulling sickies on Mondays and Fridays and being unavailable after hours even when the query is not just relevant but mission critical.
When that happens, because there are policies in place, they start being rigorously applied and the person in question either starts performing or is managed out of the business. It’s a salient lesson for those working from home and deciding to tuck themselves up in the afternoon for a power nap that extends until 3.45pm.
In the end, it is as much on the employee as it is on the employer, it doesn’t matter how progressive a company wants to be if it can’t pay salaries at the end of the month and make a profit at year end.
The sooner we all realise that economic truth, the quicker we will be able to sustainable manage the balance between employees’ needs and employers’ rights – and maybe you and I can get into the habit too of having a guilt free, company approved power nap mid-afternoon!
* Lucia Mabasa is Chief Executive Officer of pinpoint one human resources.
** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.