(No) Sleeping on the job: Hybrid work and your sleep habits

Whether you’re a hybrid worker or not, it’s important to maintain healthy sleep habits. This can be difficult at the best of times, but especially when you consider some of the consequences surrounding increased time at home and changes due to hybrid working, such as:

Increased screen time

Blue light from screens disrupts sleeping patterns by mimicking the same wavelength as daylight and throwing the body’s natural clock — the circadian rhythm — out of whack.

Blurred boundaries between work and home life

This can make it difficult to switch off and unplug from work in the evening.

Technology that makes people more contactable

This means employees can receive notifications and work-related messages even outside of work hours, leading to increased stress.

Disrupted routines

Consistent bedtime routines and regular sleeping and waking times support good sleep, but getting up and going to sleep at different times on different days depending on whether the following day is an office day or a remote working day throws routines out of kilter.

Time spent indoors

Being outside exposed to daylight, especially in the morning, can support natural sleep cycle and rhythms. Increased time indoors can limit sunlight, especially during short winter days.

Reduced time spent moving

Exercise is key to improving sleep. With shorter commutes in particular, people are often moving less while working remotely.

The impact of poor sleep

The NHS suggests the average adult needs 7-9 of good-quality sleep each night to function properly. 

However, few Brits were getting this much sleep even more the pandemic. Just 14% of adults in Great British said that they’d sleep for 8 hours per night on average over the past week in July 2019. Despite hybrid working potentially leaving more time to sleep, this had improved only marginally, to 16%, by July 2024.

Aside from the obvious fatigue and trouble focussing, there can be wider health issues stemming from prolonged poor sleep, including obesity, low immunity, heart attack and stroke, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes and cancer. On top of the health consequences, up to 20% of road crashes in the UK can be attributed in some way to fatigue.

Compounding the dire health risks for sleep-deprived employees, there’s a hit to businesses in terms of productivity. Just 1-2 nights of poor sleep per week significantly increases the risk of sickness absence, and poor sleep costs the UK economy 1.86% of GDP annually — equivalent to £42.28 billion of lost output in 2023.

How to get better sleep

There’s been an increase in demand for medical intervention to improve sleep, even though the NHS states that sleeping pills are now rarely prescribed by GPs due to side effects and the risk of dependence.

There are 11 common medications mental health charity Mind lists that are licensed for NHS doctors to prescribe for insomnia (although some also have other uses, such as antihistamines prescribed for allergies). Despite the NHS saying that sleeping pills are now rarely prescribed, in the financial year 2023/24, there were 11.5 million prescriptions written in England alone for these medications, an increase of more than 224,000 prescriptions on the previous year. In 2023/24, these prescriptions cost the NHS £133.3 million.

Given the NHS highlights the risks of resorting to sleeping tablets to get the rest, we all need make it important to explore all other avenues first and leave pharmaceutical intervention as a very last resort where everything else has failed. Instead, options such as cognitive behavioural therapy or improving sleep hygiene are better first steps to improve workers’ ability to sleep as we adapt to a hybrid working world.