Press snooze for increased productivity

Ground Floor Sheila O'FlanaganI'm not one of life's great sleepers. I do like to have unbroken sleep, but once I get a few hours I can function reasonably well the next day. Not having to be in an office at a specific time the following morning helps immensely.

When I used to have to get up at 6.30am, I would panic whenever I couldn't get to sleep before 1am. Now that's not such an issue and, of course, if someone asks me to be somewhere which means getting up at the ungodly hour, I don't really find it a problem.

Recently, though, on a trip to Spain, I noticed that I was nodding off after lunch. This may have been something to do with having a glass of wine with the meal most days; or it may have had something to do with the heat, or maybe even simply getting older; but it was probably because, in the town where I stay, everything more or less closes down for siesta time between 2.30pm and 4.30pm and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of point in wanting to be up and about and doing things.

So I napped. Half an hour usually, which is less than the average siesta taker by a long shot. But enough that when I woke up again I was feeling alert enough to tackle the Easy Sudoku in The Irish Times with confidence. (Crosaire used to be my thing. Now I'm torn between it and Sudoku. Difficult decision!)

According to news agency Ananova, the Austrian Sparkasse Bank in Steiermark has instructed staff to take a 20-minute nap every day in the hopes of increasing productivity. Manfred Walzl, a neurologist and sleep scientist who is studying productivity at the bank, has told them that a third of all Austrians suffer from some kind of sleep disorder and the consequence of this is a sleepy workforce and increased mistakes in the office.

Power napping was all the rage in the US a few years ago although it seems to have faded somewhat in popularity now and, according to the US National Sleep Foundation, less than one in five adults are allowed to nap at work. I suspect that this number is even lower here - I actually can't imagine dropping in to the MD, suggesting an extra 20 minutes for a catnap would work wonders for productivity later in the afternoon and being told to go ahead. Nevertheless, research published by Harvard - which turns out many of America's high-powered executives - demonstrates increased levels of concentration and productivity when workers are allowed to nap. The Harvard results showed that a brief nap at midday really did help people afterwards.

They also proved that an afternoon nap helped them to process what had been learned during the day. Power naps are meant to last about 20 minutes (which presumably is why Manfred Walzl has suggested that time to the bank) but in the Harvard studies, people who slept for an hour actually improved their performances on the tests set for them compared with their late morning results. All of which makes the siesta seem perfectly reasonable, even though many multinational companies in Spain remain open through the traditional early-afternoon snooze-fest.

But does the employee benefit if productivity improves?

In a general sense, productivity has been increasing for more than a century. According to US statistics (which are reflected in both Europe and Japan) an average worker needs to work just 11 hours per week to produce as much as a worker putting in 40 hours in 1950.

This means that in less than two working days you should be able to achieve a 1950s standard of living. Which I guess you could - you can junk the PlayStations and the multiple TVs around the house and entertain yourself by reading and doing Sudoku instead, while forgetting about the expensive supermarket prepared meals and making your own. Cheaper, if not quicker, but then you've got the time to spare.

But if you want something more than 1950s style living you could work a bit harder and drag yourself into the 1970s. In that case you'd need to work only 23 hours per week to hit 1975 living standards. And, if that's still too basic for you - a 29-hour working week could get you to the standard of living enjoyed by all in 1990!

That's mind-boggling. Productivity is increasing all the time but instead of it allowing us to cut back on our working hours, all it has done is made us become more voracious consumers. And of course the government wants us to want money, not time, because by having money to spend we keep manufacturers in business, supplying us with goods we didn't know we wanted and keeping the whole dizzy ball spinning relentlessly.

The French, as I mentioned recently in this column, are passionate about their 35-hour working week. But their economy is stuttering and their prices (if you exclude alcohol) aren't much different to our own. People who have jobs may be happy to work for 35 hours but they're not pushing up demand in the way the government would like and unemployment is a major problem.

Back in 2003, the German economy minister, Wolfgang Clement, suggested that Germans could no longer afford to be a workers' paradise and that cutting public holidays would help to spur economic growth. (The Germans have 10 days public holidays, but regional holidays can bring that number up to 14. By comparison, in Ireland and the UK we have eight.) Clement immediately came under fire from the IG Metall union, which told him that longer working hours were a "poison for growth" and a recipe for more unemployment.

It seems that increased productivity thanks to midday naps will ultimately benefit the bank, not the employee. Unless he or she is sneakily doing Sudoku at the desk.