VCx is a numbers-driven business. Metrics play a prominent role in just about every decision we make, from strategy to people to our sales processes.

Making a numbers-driven, “ROI” case for virtual care services is something we are well-known for and relied upon to provide. In the case of virtual primary care, for example, justifying an investment in virtual care with sound data is strightforward and usually accepted by our clients on its merits. Supporting data for this type of analysis is easy to find and validate. By focusing on labor productivity (wages and output), a compelling quantitative case can be made to invest in virtual primary care solutions, particularly for part-time employees.

Which brings us to the business case for improving the sleep quality of the workforce.

Given the obvious role that labor productivity plays in profitability, we wonder why more employers are not investing in efforts to combat what is surely one of the most significant drivers of lost productivity: poor sleep.

All of us know, intuitively, that poor sleep makes us struggle to perform at our best. Yet there is little hard analysis on the direct link between labor productivity and the sleep quality experienced by our workforces. We all know that poor sleep hurts our own performance (we postulate that the level of lost productivity across all worker categories due to sleep issues may be as high as 15%), yet there is a dearth of credible analysis and independent research that helps employers understand this critical link — even though some studies show that a lack of adequate sleep may rival alchohol and drug abuse in terms of hourly productivity losses.

There is much to learn about conditions like sleep apnea and other sleep disorders and we encourage all employers to start climbing the learning curve. A good place to gain some practical context is here and elsewhere on the GEM Sleep website. For workers who have employer-sponsored insurance plans, diagnosis and treatment may be an option. But for the uninsured? Not so easy.

Next time you order a ham sandwich from your favorite bistro and what you get back is a falafel, maybe your server just didn’t get enough sleep. The cost of that service miscue is devastating to both the customer experience and the gross margin, to say the least.