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If you’ve ever come to work after getting a bad night’s sleep and struggled to be productive—or just awake—it’s probably occurred to you that being able to take a quick nap at work would be an incredibly worker-friendly amenity. Of course, in most offices, sleeping on the job is an absolute no-go and could get you fired … but that doesn’t stop people from looking for ways to pull it off anyway.
Over the years at my work advice column, Ask a Manager, I’ve heard quite a few amazing stories about people who openly—or not so openly—napped at work, sometimes to hilarious effect. Here are a few of them:
“We had an intern who would vanish every day for prolonged periods of time. The intern’s manager and I kept noticing the disappearances and started looking around for him. We were in a small mixed office/warehouse space. At one point we found a desk chair in a corner of the warehouse where clearly he had been napping. He must have figured out we found it, and so found a new nesting spot.
We looked and looked and finally realized he had taken several throw pillows from the informal lounge/meeting area and put them under the stairwell outside our interior backdoor. One of the guys in my department put A MINT ON A PILLOW. The kid actually put a sticky note on it saying ‘Touché.’ ”
“I did a brief stint in data entry, and it was so mind-numbing and physically uncomfortable (noisy, smelly, bad chair) that I’d get sleepy. The complex was massive, and one day I found a little nook with an exit door, a sort of unused hallway off another unused hallway at the end of an unused wing. I spent my lunchtime and breaks in that nook, lying on the floor on my side. Until the day two security guys rushed down the hall, one carrying a first-aid kit, and woke me up, then grilled me about what I’d eaten that morning and if I needed to go to the hospital. I’d been spotted on a security camera, and looked ‘sprawled out,’ like I’d ‘died.’ ”
“We had a summer associate who decided it would be a good idea to PUT ON HER PAJAMAS and take a nap ON TOP OF HER DESK. I mean, I’ve dozed in my office occasionally for sure, but I didn’t climb up on top of the desk in my PJs for a snooze. She was not offered a position at the end of the summer.”
Some employees resort to creative extremes as they attempt to hide their nap breaks:
“I used to have a co-worker who would go into a small closet, sit on the floor with his knees up and phone positioned just so on his ear, and then fall asleep. So that if someone opened the door, they would just think he was doing the very normal action of taking a phone call in a small dark closet …”
“At my first job, which was an apprenticeship program at a media company, we had a monthly rotation. Every three months, I would be on a team that refused to give apprentices any work. Since this was a media company, we had private suites for phone/Zoom interviews. They weren’t soundproof but the doors were fully opaque, and you could usually determine if someone was in a phone room by listening at the door.
So, I would go in, pull up a recording of an old interview on my phone, play an ‘office keyboard typing ASMR’ video on YouTube, and take a nap. Anyone who came to listen at the door would hear me asking questions and typing, with the interviewee on speaker. Worked like a charm.”
“I worked in a clinical lab one summer. The lab technologists had stereoscopic microscopes at their cubicle desks. One of the technologists apparently was on a performance improvement plan because she was caught napping at her desk. She didn’t just lean back in her chair or lay her head on her desk, though. She would sit at the microscope and would nap with her head (maybe closed eyes even?) resting on the eyepieces of her microscope in an effort to look like she was working when she actually was sleeping.”
Of course, the dramatic increase in remote work has made sneaking away for a nap during work hours even easier. But it doesn’t always go as planned:
“I was training a group of new hires in a Teams meeting. One guy had his camera on and was working from his bedroom. At one point during my presentation, his wife came into the bedroom and flopped on the bed for a nap. Then their dog followed her and curled up on the bed. A couple minutes later, he got up from his chair, crawled into bed, and started napping with them. I don’t think he realized his camera was on.
I turned his camera off and continued with my presentation. He had to redo the training with a one-on-one trainer who made him leave the camera on the whole time to make sure he wasn’t slipping away for a snooze again.”
But while “don’t fall asleep at work” is a very common office expectation—to the point that many companies consider it a firing offense—studies show that napping at work can actually increase your productivity, lower mistakes, help you regain concentration, and improve your memory. One study found that people who took an hourlong nap tolerated frustrating tasks better than those who didn’t. Another found that nurses and physicians who napped for an average of 25 minutes showed fewer performance lapses, more energy, less fatigue, and less sleepiness. Obviously you don’t want people snoring through meetings, but there’s no point in having employees struggle through a workday exhausted if a short power nap means they’ll return to work with increased accuracy and productivity.
That’s why some employers have begun actively encouraging the practice. For example, Google has installed nap pods around its campus (with built-in sound systems so you can drift off to music), Ben & Jerry’s has a room with a bed and pillows, Nike has quiet rooms where employees are welcome to doze, and even the conservative accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has a nap room in its Swiss headquarters. There’s now even something called a nap desk, which looks like a normal desk but has a lower panel that doubles as a cot.
Not every company is on board yet, so most nappers still need to tread carefully. And just remember: If you find a mint on your secret nap pillow, assume the jig is up.
