Aetna Pays Employees To Sleep

If you work for Aetna Inc., you can get paid to sleep and count sheep.

According to a CNBC interview, Mark Bertolini, the CEO of Aetna Insurance, is offering his employees up to $500 to get more sleep. Sleeping on the job? Gotta love it.

I’m not sure if Bertolini and George Costanza are somehow related, but great minds surely think alike. And enjoy their beauty sleep, of course.

The perk is a part of Aetna’s ever-improving wellness campaign for their employees. While many companies offer wellness benefits such as gym memberships or smoking cessation assistance, Aetna is going straight to the core of wellness by providing incentive to wake up refreshed and well rested, and not just to lower annual coffee bills.

Improved shut-eye is something Bertolini claims is “really important.” The program is offering employees $25 per night of 7 hours plus of sleep for 20 nights in a row, with an annual cap of $500. The sleep will be tracked by the ever-popular fitness trackers you can see on the wrists of nearly everybody these days, which apparently are more useful than checking your heart rate after walking up a flight of stairs.

The program isn’t solely vested in the interest of good sleep or more time spent dreaming, but in pursuit of a more effective and alert workforce. According to the National Institutes of Health, 7 hours of sleep per night is the recommended minimum a person should get. But I am so done with recommendations for anything other than desserts.

Bertolini is hoping this incentive will help show up in Aetna’s revenue down the road. He quoted in a CNBC interview saying “It’s going to show up in our bottom line and in the Street’s confidence that we can do it quarter after quarter; year after year.”

I’m all for a good afternoon nap at work. But getting paid for doing so it truly a dream come true.

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