N ext time you’re caught sleeping on the job, tell your boss it’s for the good of the company. Craig Yarde will back you up. His business, Yarde Metals, is a pioneer in workplace napping.

About 10 years ago, Yarde noticed some of his employees catching catnaps during their breaks at his metals distribution company, based in Connecticut, USA. He decided to build a nap room, which has since been upgraded to a “serenity suite.” Yarde estimates that there are 10 or 12 regular nappers at corporate headquarters, and another dozen or so who do it less frequently. With everyone invested in the company – all 600 employees are stakeholders – he doesn’t worry about people abusing the policy. “There’s a self-policing effect,” he says. “Our people expect each other to work hard.”

Yarde Metals also maintains an indoor driving range and putting green, basketball and bocce courts, and a game room. But the nap has become so much a part of the company’s identity that employees compete in an annual “Napcar” competition, fashioning racecars out of mattresses to raise funds for local charities.

Still, napping is only beginning to be accepted in workplaces. Nappers themselves are still fighting – wearily, and often surreptitiously – for acceptance, but smart bosses are learning to see napping as a way to perk up their employees, not as a perk they can do without.

Setting up a workplace napping program is one of the services offered by Alertness Solutions, a California consulting firm. Mark Rosekind, the company’s president and chief scientist, says that many of its 150 clients are in “safety-sensitive industries” such as law enforcement, airlines, and trucking. “Most of our clients who use napping are doing it as a safety strategy,” he explains.

Before starting the company in 1998, Rosekind worked for seven years at NASA, where he was involved in sleep studies with pilots. The research showed that allowing pilots to have a 40-minute nap increased alertness by 54 percent and improved performance by 34 percent.

Rosekind says that pilots who weren’t allowed naps experienced “microsleeps,” lapses of consciousness that last for five or more seconds. “People are already sleeping at work,” he says. “It’s just that their bosses don’t know it, or they’re choosing to ignore it. The question for employers is, would you rather do a planned program or have people do their napping covertly?”

Daytime naps are needed largely because many people are sleep deprived, says Rosekind. “We know that if you lose sleep, you can degrade every aspect of human capability: reaction time, judgment, memory, concentration, mood. It only takes [getting] two hours less sleep than you need to be impaired at the equivalent of a .05 blood alcohol level. Four hours gets you to the equivalent of .08.”

By Rosekind’s measure, when Lin Brehmer reports to work most mornings, he meets the legal definition of drunkenness in the state of Illinois. Brehmer, a morning disc jockey on Chicago rock station WXRT since 1991, gets up at 4:30 a.m. on weekdays and regularly emcees rock concerts and charity events in the evenings. What most people call a nap, he calls a night’s sleep. “Impaired motor contol? Check. Reduced concentration? Check. Slow reaction time? Check,” Brehmer says. “If you want to study sleep deprivation, talk to any morning disc jockey.”

Microsleeps be damned, Brehmer says he has only fallen asleep on the air once, when he was an overnight DJ in New York in the late 1970s. “It was during ‘Aja’ by Steely Dan,” he says. “It could have happened to anyone.”

Boston University psychologist William Anthony and his wife, Camille, have written two books about the art of napping and set up a Web site to support desk snoozers.

“I come from a long line of nappers,” says Anthony. “I’m a professor – I write books and put people to sleep – so napping is a natural topic for me.” He believes workplace napping gained some traction as an employee perk in the late 1990s, “but when the dot-com bubble burst, employers got less concerned with keeping their employees happy and more focused on the bottom line. I think more of them are starting to see the light again, but this time it’s because science is clearly on the side of the napper.

“Employers need to understand that this is not sleeping on the job, it’s napping at the workplace,” he notes. “It’s about employees napping on their own time, during their breaks. Employers would be wise to develop a policy that says, If our employees choose to nap, they won’t lose their jobs or their reputations.”

If there’s another wave of napping on the horizon, Anthony is ready for it. He put the Web site into hibernation in January after deciding that it was too time consuming. “After 10 years,” he says, “I found that I would rather nap than talk about napping.”

Paul Engleman is a Chicago-based freelancer and a frequent contributor to The Rotarian.