We've spent four months watching our team work from home during a pandemic. The variation in how people are coping has almost nothing to do with their technical skills and almost everything to do with whether they understand their own health. Not in a medical sense. In a practical, day-to-day sense: sleep, movement, stress signals, recovery. The people who recognise when they're running down, and know what to do about it, are performing noticeably better than those who push through until something breaks.
What You Need to Know
- Health literacy, the ability to understand and manage your own wellbeing, directly affects work output
- Tech workers are particularly vulnerable to ignoring health signals because the work is sedentary and mentally absorbing
- This is the first of three literacies (health, financial, tech) we're developing as a team capability framework
- Leaders who model health awareness create permission for the team to prioritise it
Why Health Literacy Matters for Delivery
The tech industry has a productivity mythology. Long hours, late nights, energy drinks, "husking." The developer who ships at midnight is celebrated. The one who goes for a walk at 3pm is viewed with mild suspicion.
This mythology is wrong. Not morally wrong, though it is that too. Practically wrong. Cognitive work requires a brain that's functioning well. Sleep deprivation reduces cognitive performance by measurable, documented amounts. Sustained stress impairs decision-making. Physical inactivity degrades focus over weeks and months.
26%
decrease in cognitive performance after just one night of poor sleep
Source: Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep, 2017
We're not a health company. We build enterprise software. But we employ people whose primary tool is their mind, and pretending that the maintenance of that tool isn't our concern is negligent.
What We Mean by Health Literacy
We're not talking about medical knowledge. We're talking about a basic, practical understanding of the inputs and outputs that affect daily performance.
Sleep Awareness
Most of our team didn't know that consistent sleep timing matters more than sleep duration. Or that screen exposure in the hour before bed measurably affects sleep quality. Or that the post-lunch productivity dip is a circadian rhythm, not laziness.
This isn't esoteric science. It's practical information that changes daily habits. One of our developers started going to bed at the same time every night and reported better focus within two weeks. That's not a controlled study. It's an anecdote. But it's consistent with the research.
Movement Patterns
Tech work is sedentary. Eight hours at a desk, then commuting home to sit on a couch. COVID made it worse by removing even the minimal movement of a commute and office navigation.
Health literacy isn't about being fit. For knowledge workers, even small increases in physical movement have measurable cognitive benefits.
Dr Tania Wolfgramm
Chief Research Officer
We started a team practice of a five-minute break every ninety minutes. Stand up. Move. Look at something that isn't a screen. The science supports this, attention degrades after about ninety minutes of focused work. But the real benefit was normalising breaks. Before this, taking a break felt like slacking. Now it's a team practice.
Stress Recognition
Stress isn't a feeling. It's a physiological state with observable symptoms. Tight shoulders. Shallow breathing. Jaw clenching. Irritability that seems disproportionate to the trigger.
Most people don't recognise these signals until they're significant. By then, the stress has been degrading their work for days or weeks. Teaching people to notice the early signals, and giving them permission to respond, is one of the highest-value interventions we've found.
What We're Doing About It
We brought Tania in to help structure this thinking. Her background in research and evidence-based practice brought rigour to what had been ad hoc observations. Together, we identified health literacy as the first of three literacies that we think every technology professional benefits from.
The programme is simple. Not a wellness initiative. Not a corporate health programme. Just structured information sharing and team practices.
Monthly health topic. A twenty-minute session on a specific topic: sleep, movement, nutrition, stress management. Evidence-based. Practical. No preaching.
Team practices. The ninety-minute break cycle. No-meeting lunch hour. Walking meetings when possible (in pairs, on the phone, since we're all remote).
Leader modelling. I can't tell the team to take breaks if I'm visibly online at 9pm every night. The most effective health intervention we've found is leaders demonstrating that they take their own advice.
Why This Is Part of Our Work
Some leaders would say this isn't the company's business. That's a position. It's not one I agree with.
We ask people to do cognitively demanding work for eight hours a day. We benefit directly when their brains are working well. Providing basic health literacy, the same way we provide technical training, is a business investment, not a wellness perk.
This is the first literacy. Financial literacy and technology literacy come next. Together, they form a framework for developing the whole professional, not just the coder. More on that later this year.