Your productivity problem may not be strategy, culture, or motivation. It may be sleep, and it could be costing your company approximately $2,300 per employee every year.

Dr. Michael Breus is a clinical psychologist who has spent 26 years treating sleep disorders and one of only 168 people worldwide to pass the sleep medicine board examination without attending medical school. According to Dr. Breus, poor sleep affects cognitive function, reaction time and resilience, all of which can have significant effects across a business. In an office, that can mean slower decisions, missed details and work that has to be done again. In manufacturing, energy or transport, the same exhaustion can create a serious safety risk.

The employee is there, but they’re not really there.

Businesses often treat those outcomes as separate performance problems: an employee who cannot focus needs better time management, a team making poor decisions needs another process, or a leader struggling to recover after a setback needs more resilience training. Each response addresses the immediate performance issue while leaving a possible common cause, poor sleep, untouched.

That blind spot can also undermine the money companies spend on employee wellness, and Dr. Breus uses weight loss programs as an example. When someone is sleep deprived, their metabolism slows, their appetite increases, their hunger signals become stronger and it becomes harder to feel full. The business can provide the program, the employee can genuinely try to follow it, and the results can still fall short because neither has addressed the sleep deprivation working against them.

They fail dramatically because what you didn’t bother to do is check on their sleep.

Dr. Breus’s warning gives leaders another place to look when a performance or employee wellness program is not producing the expected result. Review the problem the program was designed to solve and consider whether poor sleep could be contributing to the concentration, energy, decision making, stress or behavior change issues involved. If sleep has not been considered, investigate it before investing more money in the existing program or replacing it with another one.

Melissa’s Take

I have participated in wellness programs since I was an athlete in school, and I do not remember sleep being treated as part of performance until relatively recently.

We talked about training, nutrition, discipline, and motivation. Sleep sat outside the program as though it had nothing to do with the result.

I see the same mistake in business.

We separate productivity, resilience, safety, leadership performance, and employee wellness into different initiatives. Then we fund a different solution for each one.

That may make sense on an organizational chart, but people do not experience these issues in separate departments. The same exhausted person is moving through all of them.

If poor sleep is contributing to several performance problems, a company can spend a great deal of money treating each symptom without addressing what connects them.

This does not mean leaders should monitor when employees go to bed or turn sleep into another compliance exercise. It means we should stop pretending that human performance can be separated from human biology.

Choose one performance or wellness initiative that is not producing the expected return and ask:

Where does sleep appear in our understanding of this problem?

If it does not appear at all, investigate that gap before purchasing another program, adding another process, or blaming employees for failing to produce the expected result.

This is part of a fuller conversation with Dr. Michael Breus about how poor sleep affects productivity and safety, how different sleep patterns influence when people perform at their best, the warning signs of sleep apnea, and five practical changes that can improve sleep quality.

The Full Executive Brief goes deeper into every conversation on the podcast, with the context and the follow-up you won’t get from the audio alone. Subscribers also get access to the Maverick Test, a short diagnostic built to show you where your own leadership has gaps you haven’t named yet.