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Working remotely from home during the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in significant shifts and disruptions in the personal and work lives of millions of information workers and their teams. We examined how sleep patterns---an important component of mental and physical health---relates to teamwork. We used wearable sensing and daily questionnaires to examine sleep patterns, affect, and perceptions of teamwork in 71 information workers from 22 teams over a ten-week period. Participants reported delays in sleep onset and offset as well as longer sleep duration during the pandemic. A similar shift was found in work schedules, though total work hours did not change significantly. Surprisingly, we found that more sleep was negatively related to positive affect, perceptions of teamwork, and perceptions of team productivity. However, a greater misalignment in the sleep patterns of members in a team predicted positive affect and teamwork after accounting for individual differences in sleep preferences. A follow-up analysis of exit interviews with participants revealed team-working conventions and collaborative mindsets as prominent themes that might help explain some of the ways that misalignment in sleep can affect teamwork. We discuss implications of sleep and sleep misalignment in work-from-home contexts with an eye towards leveraging sleep data to facilitate remote teamwork.
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Rapid sleep education: If you could tell people one thing about sleep, what should it be?
Summary Informal learning settings such as museums provide unique opportunities for educating a local community about sleep. However, in such settings, information must be capable of immediately inciting interest. We developed a series of sleep “icebreakers” (brief, informal facts) to determine whether they elicited interest in sleep and encouraged behavioural change. There were 859 participants across three cross‐sectional samples: (a) members of the local museum; (b) Mechanical Turk workers who responded to a “sleep” study advertisement; and (c) Mechanical Turk workers who responded to a “various topics” study advertisement that did not mention sleep. All three samples demonstrated high interest in sleep topics, though delayed recall of the icebreakers was strongest in participants who expected to learn about the sleep topics. Icebreaker interest ratings were independent of age, gender and race/ethnicity, suggesting that sleep is a topic of universal interest. Importantly, regardless of demographics and sample, the more the icebreakers interested the participants, the more likely participants were to indicate willingness to donate to a sleep exhibit, change their sleep behaviours, and post to social media. Thus, sleep icebreakers can rapidly elicit people's interest, and future outreach efforts should couple icebreakers with opportunities for subsequent personalized learning.
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- PAR ID:
- 10412361
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Sleep Research
- Volume:
- 32
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 0962-1105
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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