ChronoWorking – “No company can afford to blow €2,000/MA every year!”
Companies are increasingly under massive pressure: increasing mental stress, declining performance, daily fatigue, with fewer opportunities to compensate. While a case of illness caused by a respiratory illness, for example, lasted an average of 6.1 days in 2023, employees with mental illnesses were absent for an average of 28.1 days per case of illness, according to the AOK Absenteeism Report 20241.
Many seem to completely ignore this, because at the same time, employees are expected to deliver consistently high results despite fatigue, information overload and work intensification, which fuels development. This is precisely where the biggest blind spot of modern organizations arises: the biological performance of their employees. While the “will” is growing, the “ability” is increasingly declining, which usually only comes to light when nothing works anymore. There is now a prevention option that pays for itself in a very short time.
Studies clearly show this.
- As early as 2010, the study by Rosekind et al.2 showed that optimized sleep quality generates an economic benefit of USD 1,967 per employee per year. And that was at a time when mental exhaustion and chronic fatigue had not yet reached anywhere near today’s levels. In other words: today, this figure is more likely to be a well-formulated lower limit.
- The survey “Why sleep matters3” by the think tank RAND Corporation also identified costs of € 48 billion for the German economy due to sleep deprivation in a study published in 2016 – before the pandemic. The costs are now estimated at over €60 billion and rising.
- Our AI-supported evaluations from our own scientifically supported pilot projects4 confirm this dimension. Even small, targeted interventions in the areas of sleep,
chronotypes and work rhythms generate an averageeconomic benefit of €2,000 per employee per year , calculated on a best-case basis. And these effects are often achieved without cost-intensive changes, but simply by raising awareness and making minimal internal adjustments to support the biological performance of employees.
The most intelligent approach?
Act instead of react.
The most effective investment?
A scientifically sound, high-quality and practice-focused training course for one or more employees in chronobiology and ChronoWorking, currently €2,300/person.
The return?
With just ten employees in the company: approx. €20,000 savings per year.
ChronoWorking ROI in the first year: +700%.
The larger the company, the more exponential the increase in ROI.
In contrast, classic efficiency measures, such as meeting reduction, process optimization or automation, only provide short-term relief. They save time. But they do not improve
Conclusion
ChronoWorking addresses precisely this biological bottleneck. It reduces
- the risk of downtime,
- Increases the ability to concentrate
- increases the utilization potential of biological performance
- stabilizes the power energy
- and significantly reduces the risk of errors and accidents due to fatigue or mental exhaustion – the most expensive costs that companies are tacitly bearing today.
If sleep quality and work rhythm are not right, every company loses money every day, a lot of money, never budgeted, but real. And with every week that passes, these hidden costs continue to rise.
ChronoWorking is not a “nice-to-have”, but an economic must-have.
Companies that want high-performing, healthy and resilient employees and need to reduce costs at the same time cannot avoid this approach if they also want to retain skilled workers. The evidence is there, the figures are there, and the ROI is faster than with any classic efficiency project.
If you invest now, you will profit immediately.
If you wait, you will pay for it every day.
Michael Wieden
Sources
1AOK absenteeism report2024: https://www.aok.de/pp/gg/daten-und-analysen/fehlzeiten-report/
2RosekindMR, Gregory KB, Mallis MM, Brandt SL, Seal B, Lerner D. The cost of poor sleep: workplace productivity loss and associated costs. J Occup Environ Med. 2010 Jan;52(1):91-8. doi: 10.1097/JOM.0b013e3181c78c30. PMID: 20042880.
3MarcoHafner, Martin Stepanek, Jirka Taylor, Wendy M. Troxel, Christian Van Stolk. Why sleep matters – the economic costs of insufficient sleep, A cross-country comparative analysis. Tand Corporation 2016 https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1791.html
4COPEP2019-2021 https://www.wieden.com/chronobiologie-news/schichtarbeit-chronotyp/