With a flurry of research on 4-day workweeks and 5-hour work days, the notion of how our days are best structured is gaining increasing attention. As it should. The concept of the eight-hour workday is itself a relatively recent invention with Robert Owen discussing the division of the day into three equal parts–"eight hours labor, eight hours recreation, eight hours rest"–in 1817.

However, it was not until 1926 that the concept of the 40-hour workweek really took off with Ford Motor Company instating a five-day, 40-hour workweek. While most would agree that the nature of work has changed dramatically since 1926–with the introduction of flexible time, remote work, not to mention the technological enhancements that have transformed the modern workplace–the luster of the productivity benchmarks of yore have long since faded.

In considering new modes of work adapted for the 21st century, we need to pay careful attention to how organizational structures, workplace behaviors, productivity, and health relate to each other. A 2019 study looked at precisely these relationships and found that mental health, physical health, job characteristics, and organizational support are the most important determinants of productivity. Organizations, in short, are unique communities with diverse individuals, which need to be treated as such, with adequate levels of thoughtfulness and sophistication.

While the relationships between health, productivity and the workplace are complicated, research provides tantalizing perspectives into the potential of getting these elements right in the workplace. Sleep is an oft-cited example of how health and productivity relate to each other. Even though it is wholly intuitive that you need to rest for eight hours a day à la Robert Owen, eight hours of sleep is surprisingly difficult to come by and has a complicated relationship with work. Take for instance a recent article in The New York Times noting that "sleep can be good for your salary." In it, the author cites a 2018 study illustrating that a one-hour increase in weekly sleep leads to increased earnings by 1.1 percent in the short run and 5 percent in the long run.

This plays out in our own data where we see that individuals who self-assess their work performance as a 10 out of 10, get over seven days more sleep per year on average than those who rate their performance as a 5 out of 10. But organizational context matters and, as the article also points out, "sleep can affect work, but it's also true that work can affect sleep."

The research also found that on average, individuals reporting serious work-related stress issues sleep almost 30 minutes less per night (or 7.6 days per year) than those reporting little to no work-related stress. While the boosted earnings for higher sleepers is an encouraging result, how sleep impacts an individual day-to-day – as a function of good health and their ability to perform at their best – is even more instructive.

It is indisputable that sleep is an important determinant of health, with its absence associated with seven of the 15 leading causes of death. A RAND Europe study, leveraging our Britain's Healthiest Workplace data, illustrated that insufficient sleep is associated with a seven to 13 percent increase in mortality risk for all causes of death. They also found that insufficient sleep is costly for employers, as it is associated with 1.5 to 2.4 percent greater productivity loss due to absenteeism and presenteeism.

In short, ensuring people get enough sleep is not only potentially good for an employee's wallet and health, but also benefits the employer from a productivity perspective. Recent studies have further added to the evidence base concerning the scale of the impact of health on productivity. A recent RAND Europe study, conducted in conjunction with Vitality, illustrated that if all adults aged 18-64 walked just 15 minutes more a day, the world economy could grow by an average of $100 billion a year until 2050.

With the power of sleep and exercise to increase productivity in their own rights, layering on workplace behaviors and new modes of work has the potential to have a truly profound impact on the workplace of the 21st century.

In the modern workplace, we need to guard against becoming unwitting victims of technology's success. This means organizations revisiting how they structure the work week to give people more time outside of work so they can potentially be healthier and more productive while there.

Technology has transformed the workplace. The next frontier is how workplaces leverage science and technology to enhance and protect the lives of their employees further. Whether it is revisiting optimal work hours or beyond it's critical that we define what a healthy and productive future of work looks like.

Daniel Kotzen is director of product and analytics for Vitality Group.

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Rethinking health and productivity for the 21st century workplace

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