The Zombie Workforce

The ding, ping, glow… we’ve got to give the UI designers credit: when our smartphones call to us, we answer. Our seemingly innocuous response—the glance at the glowing screen, the swipe to unlock, the quick skim—can initiate psychological and biological events that impact our work performance every day… but it all starts at night.

If you’re like the rest of us, you check your phone within 30 minutes of going to sleep, and then sleep with—or within arm’s reach—of it (Marsden & Lee, 2016). With startups offering more flexible work/life balance and with global teams dispersed across time zones, there’s a good chance that your bedtime phone notifications are about work. While you may think you’re squeezing out one last dose of hustle before sleep, reading that email from your boss or replying to that Slack message actually puts you in a psychological state called Affective Rumination and sets you up to fail (Lanag et al., 2014).

You know Affective Rumination because you’ve been there. You eat dinner, watch a soothing episode of The Walking Dead, and then hop in bed and hit the lights. As you’re dozing off, your phone buzzes. It’s an agenda for tomorrow’s “surprise” meeting. Fast forward two hours and you’re wide awake, squinting at your screen in the dark and attempting to prepare. What happened here? A colleague, likely awake in affective rumination, passed the sleeplessness on to you via a phone notification, and you took the bait. Eventually, you fall asleep, and then the biological effects begin.

For hundreds of thousands of years, human biology developed to interpret darkness as sleep-time and light as work-time. The last 100+ or so years since the invention of the light bulb simply can’t undo that. Research shows that exposure to light while sleeping, even a small light shined on the back of the knee, interrupts the body’s production of melatonin: a hormone needed for restful sleep (Campbell & Murphy, 1998). Holding a glowing phone inches from your face while in bed is like telling your body, “it’s not night time anymore, let’s get to work!” When it’s actually time to get to work the next morning, you’re groggy, you struggle to engage, and you’ve lost momentum for the rest of the day.

Take a look around your office and you’ll see that you’re not the only one. By 10am, you and an army of your peers are reaching for that 3rd cup of coffee just to make it through the morning. Sleeplessness and its effects are pervasive. So why is no one talking about it? Even culture-forward startups consider sleep to be part of an employee’s “private time” and are therefore “respectfully” silent on the subject. Yet each night, companies proceed to invade this so-called “private time” with late-night communications, ironically sabotaging productivity each morning. Instead of having an engaged workforce, startups become zombie cubicle farms, pumping out mediocrity, with frustrated managers wondering why people aren't working harder. Sleep is a strategic resource for your startup, for your team, and for yourself (Barnes & Spreitzer, 2015). Here’s how to start treating it like one...

Take Action: Resurrecting the Zombies

• Startups should proactively develop and communicate a healthy Sleep Culture. Many modern professionals choose to (and prefer to) tackle some tasks from home after work. This shouldn’t be discouraged. Instead, provide education on the effects of late-night device usage and establish norms to protect sleep hours. Give special consideration to minimizing ping-pong effects that can occur when one sleepless employee triggers a cascade of sleeplessness among colleagues or, when ping-pong effects occur between teams in different time zones.

• If you are a manager or team leader, you dictate the micro-culture of your team. When you make requests or send emails late at night, your team feels pressure to respond. While you may think you’re being productive, don’t be surprised if you’re surrounded by unproductive zombies the next morning. Conversely, you have the power to model and promote healthy sleep habits among your team. While you’ll no longer get answers to your questions at 10pm, in the long run, everyone benefits.

• Progressively “detach” from work as bedtime approaches with a strict no-screen rule within an hour of sleeping.
• Get familiar with the sleep/bedtime settings on your phone (check out iPhone Bedtime and Sleep as Android).
• Keep your phone face-down or outside the bedroom through the night so that, if it lights up, your body isn’t disturbed.
• If you sleep well, your mornings at the office have more productivity potential than any other time of day. So start the day strong: turn on your deep-work playlist and tackle your most complex tasks.

Thanks for reading. Project [Re]Work is a free weekly newsletter enhancing workplace performance with cutting-edge research. Sign up here.

Now, get some phone-free sleep tonight!

Definitions

• Affective Rumination: dwelling on and thinking deeply about a problem while in an unproductive state, leading to increased stress and no immediate resolution to problem.
• Sleep Culture: the collective practice of behaviors that facilitate sleep and the avoidance of behaviors that interfere with sleep.
• Melatonin: a hormone that inhibits the body’s wakefulness mechanisms, thereby activating sleep-related processes (Lavie, 1986, 2001). Light inhibits the production of melatonin (Lavie, 2001).

• Lanaj, Klodiana, Johnson, Russell E. and Barnes, Christopher M. 2014, Beginning the workday yet already depleted? Consequences of late-night smartphone use and sleep, Organizational behavior and human decision processes, vol. 124, no. 1, pp. 11-23, doi: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2014.01.001.
• Querstret, D., & Cropley, M. (2012). Exploring the relationship between work-related rumination, sleep quality, and work-related fatigue. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 17(3), 341-353.
• Riedel, B. W. (2000). Sleep hygiene. In Lichstein, K. L., and Morin, C. M. (Eds.), Treatment of Late-life Insomnia, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 125–146. Mastin, D.F., Bryson, J. & Corwyn, R. J Behav Med (2006) 29: 223. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-006-9047-6
• Breaking out from Constant Connectivity: Agentic Regulation of Smartphone Use. By: Russo, Marcello; Ollier-Malaterre, Ariane; and Morandin, Gabriele. 2019. Computers in Human Behavior.
• The Interaction Design Foundation. (2019). Preattentive Visual Properties and How to Use Them in Information Visualization. [online] Available at: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/preattentive-visual-properties-and-how-to-use-them-in-information-visualization [Accessed 5 Jul. 2019].
• Breaking out from Constant Connectivity: Agentic Regulation of Smartphone Use. By: Russo, Marcello; Ollier-Malaterre, Ariane; and Morandin, Gabriele. 2019. Computers in Human Behavior.
• Gombert, L.; Konze, A.-K.; Rivkin, W.; Schmidt, K.-H.: Protect your sleep when work is calling: how work-related smartphone use during non-work time and sleep quality impact next-day self-control processes at work. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 15: (8): 1757 (15 pp) (2018)
• Campbell, S. S., & Murphy, P. J. (1998). Extraocular circadian phototransduction in humans. Science, 279, 396–399.
• Volkmer, S. A., & Lermer, E. (2019). Unhappy and addicted to your phone? – Higher mobile phone use is associated with lower well-being. Computers in Human Behavior, 93, 210–218. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2018.12.015
• Van Laethem, M., van Vianen, A., & Derks, D. (2018). Daily Fluctuations in Smartphone Use, Psychological Detachment, and Work Engagement: The Role of Workplace Telepressure. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 1808. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01808
• Gadeyne, N., Verbruggen, M., Delanoeije, J., & De Cooman, R. (2018). All wired, all tired? Work-related ICT-use outside work hours and work-to-home conflict: The role of integration preference, integration norms and work demands. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 107, 86–99. doi:10.1016/j.jvb.2018.03.008
• Sonnentag, S., Eck, K., Fritz, C., & Kühnel, J. (2019). Morning Reattachment to Work and Work Engagement During the Day: A Look at Day-Level Mediators. Journal of Management. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206319829823
• SHIMAZU, A., MATSUDAIRA, K., JONGE, J. D., TOSAKA, N., WATANABE, K., & TAKAHASHI, M. (2016). Psychological detachment from work during non-work time: linear or curvilinear relations with mental health and work engagement? INDUSTRIAL HEALTH, 54(3), 282–292. doi:10.2486/indhealth.2015-0097
• Barnes, Christopher & Spreitzer, G. (2015). Why sleep is a strategic resource. 56. 19-21.
• Ellis, D. A. (2019). Are smartphones really that bad? Improving the psychological measurement of technology-related behaviors. Computers in Human Behavior, 97, 60–66. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2019.03.006
• Barnes, C. M. (2012). Working in our sleep. Organizational Psychology Review, 2(3), 234–257. doi:10.1177/2041386612450181
• Baumeister, R. F., & Vohs, K. D. (2007). Self-Regulation, Ego Depletion, and Motivation. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 1(1), 115–128. doi:10.1111/j.1751-9004.2007.00001.x
• Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Muraven, M., & Tice, D. M. (1998). Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(5), 1252–1265. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.74.5.1252
• Horwood, S., & Anglim, J. (2019). Problematic smartphone usage and subjective and psychological well-being. Computers in Human Behavior, 97, 44–50. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2019.02.028
• Marsden, E., & Lee, P. (2016). There's no place like phone: Consumer usage patterns in the era of smartphone. Deloitte Global Mobile Consumer Survey 2016: UK cut [PDF]. Retrieved from: http://www.deloitte.co.uk/mobileuk2016/assets/pdf/Deloitte-Mobile-Consumer-2016-There-is-no-place-like-phone.pdf
• Riedel, B. W. (2000). Sleep hygiene. In Lichstein, K. L., and Morin, C. M. (Eds.), Treatment of Late-life Insomnia, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 125–146.