Do you wake up refreshed and energised or do you struggle out of bed following another restless night tired even before the day has started? You are not alone a new study by Vielife involving 38,784 employees has revealed 1 in 3 workers suffers poor sleep due to stress, modern working methods and taking work home. Sleep deprivation makes people confused, forgetful and experience difficulty concentrating. The report concludes that many are too tired to do their job properly. Alarming if you are an air traffic controller, dangerous if you are a long distance lorry driver, not good for business efficiency and not good for your health as lack of sleep has been linked to strokes and heart disease.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the problem is on the increase financial worries, fear of redundancy and cut backs leading to increased work loads are bound to affect our ability to relax. All the more so for managers who have traditionally found it difficult to switch off when leaving the office. Manages in the public sector are the ones who face up to a hostile group of relatives angry that cut backs will result in the with drawl of much needed services or explaining to staff that the restructuring means job losses and applying for your own job in the new structure. As organisations seek to reduce over heads and go for slimmer management structures those left find they take work home most evenings and weekends. The lap top and the Blackberry now mean you can catch up on those emails from home. As the distinction between home and office becomes increasingly blurred the ability to switch off becomes harder.
A colleague of mine on the senior management team is a big Wigan Athletic fan, a season ticket holder who goes to all the games I discovered he was reading his emails off his Blackberry at half time! I regularly came across managers who did not take their full entitlement of annual leave saying they were too busy and carrying it over to the next year thus compounding the problem and eventually forfeiting the time off . A former boss never took annual leave he said he found holidays boring. One year under pressure from his wife and family he booked two weeks camping in Wales. After only two days he was ringing the office to check everything was ok. He came back after a week saying he had left the family down there and was joining them at the weekend! This was a man badly in need of a holiday and some good night’s sleep. He was notoriously forgetful and would drive his PA to distraction by managing to” lose” his papers for a meeting between his office and the meeting room. He would then say accusingly “did you give me those papers I asked for”. He would ask one of the team to do something urgently only for them to find out he had asked someone else to do the same thing the day before. He had a very short concentration span and often embarrassed the team by leaving a meeting with a partner agency or excusing himself half way through a presentation to make an urgent telephone call which turned out to be just checking with his PA if there were any messages!
Being able to switch off is a very important management skill one I only learnt after my quadruple heart bi pass operation.
Blair McPherson is a former Director in a large local authority and author of UnLearning management Equipping managers for an uncertain future both published by Russell House.
