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Good-Night-Sleep

A Good Night’s Sleep is essential

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A Good Night’s Sleep is essential

There is always too much to think about and to do when you’re a small trader  running your own business, so a good night’s sleep is essential.

But too many of us find ourselves lying in bed wakeful with so many thoughts running through our heads.

Almost three quarters of people in the UK (71%) don’t get the recommended 7-9 hours of sleep per night, according to a study, external last year by insurance group Direct Line. It found that one in seven were getting less than five hours.

Sleep issues can be caused by a wide variety of factors, including stress, shift work and caffeine or alcohol consumption.

A lack of sleep plays a role in high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and even mental health problems, according to the UK Health Security Agency, external (which was previously called Public Health England).

And that spills over to the economy. One report says that sleep deprivation costs the UK up to £40bn a year in lost productivity., external

So what can you do to ensure you get a good rest so your brain is firing on all cylinders during the working day?

Rather than sleeping pills why not try the phenomenon of sleep stories – which are soothing tales provided via apps and podcasts.

Try a google to find out more.

Worker-Burnout

Is the pace of change in AI contributing to worker burnout?

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Is the pace of change in AI contributing to worker burnout?

One business owner has reported that asking employees to use the AI language tool has created stress and tension rather than increasing productivity.

Staff reported that tasks were in fact taking longer as they had to create a brief and prompts for ChatGPT, while also having to double check its output for inaccuracies, of which there were many.

Also, every time the platform updated they had to learn its new features, which also took extra time.

The business owner in question said: “There’s an overflow of AI tools in the market, and no single tool solves multiple problems. As a result, I constantly needed to keep tabs on multiple AI tools to execute tasks, which became more of a mess. It was hard to track which tool was supposed to do what, and I started getting utterly frustrated”.

In freelancer platform Upwork’s survey of 2,500 knowledge workers in the US, UK, Australia and Canada 61% of people believe that using AI at work will increase their chances of experiencing burnout.

A management professor at the University of California in Los Angeles, commented: “Using multiple apps requires additional time to learn them and switch between them, and this lost time is painful because we are so sensitive to wasted time.”

Clearly AI use is not going to go away, but it needs to be used judiciously and selectively.

Avoid-Staff-Burnout

Avoid Staff Burnout!

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Arguably a business’ employees are its greatest asset.

This has been recognised recently by companies like Bumble, Hootsuite, and Mozilla who have reportedly shut down for a week to give their staff a break.

The argument is that ensuring everybody has a week off at the same time means they won’t be returning to a flood of emails and work to catch up on as they would if only some were given time off while others continued working.

The last 18 months have been a stressful time for everyone with employees struggling to maintain productivity in the face of lockdowns, staff shortages, supply chain issues, remote working to name just a few.

Given that the availability of staff is predicted to be a continuing problem post-Brexit, therefore, it makes sense for employers to take care of those they have, to value them and to show it.

Protecting their physical and mental health and helping them to have a healthy work-life balance could make the difference between losing staff and keeping them.

There are other suggestions for ensuring staff are healthy and able to perform in this article.