Flexible work hours improve overall health

“In the absence of sufficient sleep, we are not as attentive or alert, process information more slowly, miss or misinterpret social and emotional cues and decision making is impaired,” said Orfeu M. Buxton, associate professor of biobehavioral health at Pennsylvania State University. Buxton and colleagues looked to see if a workplace intervention, designed to increase family-supportive supervision and give employees more control over their work time, improved sleep quantity and quality. The researchers followed 474 employees, with nearly half of the employees serving as the control while the other half experienced the study intervention. The intervention was designed to reduce conflicts between work and personal life and focused on two main cultural shifts: allowing employees to decide on when and where they worked and training supervisors to support their employees’ personal lives.