How to Help Your Employees Turn Off Work and Sleep Better
Healthy sleep habits and restful sleep are crucial to a person’s overall health. Sleep also plays an important role in work productivity, as sleep deprivation can affect a person’s ability to concentrate and focus.
Right now, your employees are likely working full-time from home and have to reconcile work and family obligations every day. They’re faced with new challenges and new routines. And even though they’re not in the office, they need your help now more than ever as stay-at-home (and, therefore, work-from-home) orders remain in place. Helping your employees mitigate their stress levels and build good sleep habits will keep them healthy and focused. Start by sharing these three tips:
Establish a Solid Work-From-Home Routine
Encourage your employees to set up a daily routine that includes morning workouts or walks, getting ready as if going to the office, or having virtual coffees with co-workers.
And remind them to honor the end-of-day routines, too. Working from home can make turning off work difficult. Suggest that employees put away their laptops at the end of the day, to make a visual difference between work time and family time. Taking a walk right after the last task of the day can also be a good way to help them mentally make the switch.
Use Exercise to Decompress
Regular exercise is a great way to reduce stress and can contribute to more sound and restful sleep. Regular physical activity increases time spent in deep sleep, the most physically restorative sleep phase. Deep sleep helps to boost immune function, support cardiac health, and control stress and anxiety.
Even though regular exercise routines might be disrupted, encourage your employees to exercise regularly at home by sharing home workout plans. My decompression sessions of choice are the workouts in Fitbit Premium (“Cardio Crunch” at the end of a stressful day works wonders). Fitbit Premium includes thousands of workouts with 16 different trainers that are tailored to every individual’s needs and fitness levels.
Make Meditation a Daily Habit
Meditation, which includes breathing exercises and full-body relaxation, is a great way to prepare mentally and physically for restful sleep. We tend to conflate relaxation and distractions. While both have benefits, texting, browsing social media, or watching Tiger King doesn’t help reduce stress or provide a path to restful sleep.
A great way to help your employees turn off work is to suggest spending a few minutes breathing deeply, focusing on positive imagery, and doing a mental body scan at the end of the day and/or before going to sleep.
Finally, here’s a personal favorite in my dream team routine: Fitbit Relax. Available on the Fitbit Charge 3, Charge 4, Ionic, Versa Series, and Inspire HR, Fitbit Relax helps you find moments of calm with a personalized, guided breathing session based on your heart rate. Doing guided breathing sessions regularly can bring more mindfulness to your daily life and relaxation to your evening routine. And the result could be a healthier, calmer, more focused you—all from just a few minutes of inhales and exhales.