Sleep well, work well, live well: Bring joy to your employees

The modern day is broken up into thirds, with eight hours of sleep, eight hours of work, and eight hours to dabble in your favorite hobbies like painting, hiking, or building a frustratingly complex particle board bookshelf that came with the instructions to a slightly different model. It’s the rhythm of today’s society.

We all know the impact that sleep can have on a person. Not getting enough rest can affect concentration, mood, memory, and balance among other issues. These common effects have led to countless studies, practices, and products all designed to help humans ease into their REM cycles a little easier. Lights that slowly dim as you wind down for the day, mattresses with variable firmness, ambience noise to sooth, and alarms that are a bit gentler than the hammer and bell models. So much of a person’s outlook and attitude is impacted by a few extra beats of slumber, it only makes sense that the advances achieved by researchers and innovators are lauded.

Work is the other third of our day, and much like sleep, environmental conditions play a huge role in a person’s wellbeing. Only recently has research extended beyond the salient dynamic around interpersonal relationships or manager-subordinate communication, and started exploring the resonance of culture, benefits, technology, and the overall experience an employee has in comparison to other aspects of their life. Lacking any of those elements may impact productivity, motivation, and creativity to the same degree as a restless night of sleep.

Companies need to invest more in the experience of their employees, mainly listening to feedback and adjusting when appropriate. Sadly, it seems many organizations either aren’t doing that, or their efforts are falling flat. As part of ServiceNow’s Employee Experience Imperative research, we found over half (52%) of employees do not believe employers are invested in improving the employee experience for their workers, and only 40% believe supplied feedback is acted upon by their employers.

It’s a problem that needs to be tackled by the entire leadership team, not just the head of HR. Recently, ServiceNow’s CHRO Pat Wadors and CIO Chris Bedi sat down to discuss how these statistics correlate with their experiences.
 

From the employee point of view, feeling like you don’t have a voice is demoralizing and can sap energy and joy. In addition, many are finding that their work life doesn’t match their home life. Information on benefits, policies, and leave is difficult to find, different departments have siloed methods to request services, and there is a general lack of mobile adoption for getting stuff down. Trying to work cross functionally in some offices is so frustrating, it’s like waking up to the sounds of a jackhammer outside your window.

When ServiceNow launched its HR Service Delivery product, the desire was to remove friction from the common and complex challenges an organization faces when managing a workforce. It is the only enterprise-wide service delivery platform that can help employees find answers and get stuff done across IT, HR, Facilities, Legal, and Finance.

Many of these solutions came from listening to our own employees, as Wadors advocates for in the below video. Open lines of feedback not only helps you ingratiate yourself with your workers, but it also helps you anticipate they needs.

For the companies that are investing in their employee experience, it is the blue light removing, soothing sound proving, adjustable mattress on which their employees can snuggle up with during the workday so that they can be their best selves when taking on the final third phase of their day… tackling that dreaded bookshelf.