There's at least one banker out there who's asking his employees to sleep on the job.
Gerhard Fabisch, the chairman of the board at Steiermaerki Sparkasse, a savings bank in Steiermark, Austria, last month recruited 20 employees to join him each day after lunch for 20-minute naps in a specially designated sleeping room.
It's all part of a three-month study by an Austrian neurologist, Manfred Walzl, on the effect of afternoon naps on productivity.
In a July 20 press release announcing the study, Mr. Fabisch said management is promoting "power napping" to advance a nationwide campaign to improve employee health.
Apparently on-the-job sleepiness is a big problem in Austria. A third of all Austrians suffer from sleep disorders, Dr. Walzl said, and "job tiredness and increased error rates are the result."
He hopes the study will spur other companies to encourage employees to nap.
Would management-sanctioned power napping ever catch on here? Bert Ely, a banking consultant in Alexandria, Va., said he certainly thinks it should.
"I nap every day - I have a sleeping bag in my office that I just roll out whenever I'm tired," Mr. Ely said. "I find that a 15- to 30-minute nap is incredibly refreshing, and my work is definitely better after that," he said.
But Craig Bernard, the president of Austin Financial Services Inc., a Toledo consulting firm, doubts that banks would go for it.
Given "all of the perceptions about bankers playing golf all day," he said, word that banks were letting employees take naps would not help their reputation.
