The firm has been pretty serious about the impact of sleep deprivation on its employee performance and so pushed them to sign up to a scheme that rewards them for getting at least seven hours of sleep per night.
The staff at Aetna loved the idea, introduced in 2009 for the first time, by their firm. For participating in the scheme they can earn $25 for every 20 nights which means for a seven hours or more sleep, they can make up to a limit of $300 a year.
So far, at least 12,000 of the firm's 25,000 employees participated in the sleep scheme last year, a rise from 10,000 in 2014.
And wait, Aetna employees cannot ditch the firm.
They either record their sleep with a wrist monitor that connects them to Aetna computers. But they are also trusted to manually record how long they slept every night.
Aetna's vice president of employee benefits, Kay Mooney said the sleep scheme is ‘one of many different healthy behaviours we wanted staff to track’. Aetna staff also get extra funds if they exercise.
Regarding the sleeping programme, Ms Mooney said Aetna likes to view itself as a ‘living laboratory, to see if this is something effective for other large employers as well’.
Aetna is not concerned that some workers may be pocketing the cash without actually getting sleep.
We’re not worried, it’s on the honour system, we trust our staff, she added.
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