Time magazine recently cited new studies by H.R. consultants and the National Business Group on Health. No consultant would be happy without showing numbers because measuring things is what they do. The upshot is large companies are spending money, or planning to spend money, on encouraging employees to stay, or get, healthy. The usual suspects are targeted: diet and exercise.  This is good, but what’s missing?

Answer: sleep and rest.

In kindergarten children have a nap after lunch. Why not workers? I work in a culture of one. I embrace the afternoon nap. If ever there was a productivity method, it’s napping when you’re tired. It’s rejuvenating and refreshing. When the serotonin levels dip after lunch that’s a signal for brain to rest. And if you’re tired you’re going to make mistakes.

This is a no-cost workplace-wellness practice. Of course, it’s counter-cultural. Even the siesta in Spain has been losing its appeal in a misplaced effort at workforce productivity. Why can’t the likes of Towers Perrin and Watson Wyatt try to study companies where employees are encouraged to take a nap?

You don’t think there are any? Just try asking Arshad Chowdhury, co-founder of MetroNaps.

When I asked him about the difficulty of getting people to take a nap at work, he said that it was matter of culture. But even large rule-bound companies are making headway. At the time I interviewed Chowdhury, employees at Proctor & Gamble Services in Germany had embraced power napping.

MetroNaps sells a futuristic chair which appeals to office culture. However, employers don’t need to spend huge amounts on employee wellness.  I know this is a heretical statement. They could do well by allocating a rest area and encouraging people to recharge.

We tend to think that everything is solved by technology when just doing something different can work better. Remember how much NASA spent developing a pen that would write upside down in zero gravity? The Russians solved the problem of zero gravity by writing with a pencil.  You don’t always need rocket science.

According to an article in the Pacific Business News, employees of Starwood Hotels and Resorts in Hawaii are offered some pretty nice incentives to stay healthy. One hundred dollars to participate in risk assessment and biometric screenings. Employees get a further $100 for losing ten pounds or enrolling in stress-management classes.

You would think it would be obvious for a resort to serve healthy food to their employees but this is now part of the plan. The thing I like best is the routine stretching classes. Couldn’t we all do with a stretch and relax class? The discounted gym memberships sound fine. But being a long-term gym member, I’ve seen the January effect all too often. Lots of people have good intentions but they fail to follow through.

Qigong (pronounced chee gung, and sometimes written Chi-Kung) has been around for a while. Well, thousands of years in one form or another. One branch  became Tai Chi, a martial art. However, Shibashi qigong is relatively new, and its origin in this form is ascribed to two Chinese doctors in the 1970′s. Shibashi qigong is a series of 18 slow and gentle movements and it isn’t about fighting.

There are wild claims that qigong can do just about anything for you, from treating diseases to making you smarter. I’ve been practicing the 18 slow and gentle movements daily for the past 11 years, and I’m no smarter today than I was when I started.  But I do feel these exercises have kept me flexible, calm, and balanced. I taught these expercises to my wife and she in turn took this into the workplace and started teaching during a lunch break.  Her classes are popular.

As educational guru Sir Ken Robinson says, we are educated from the neck up and slightly to one side. Our culture is left-brained to the extent we think of our bodies as a way of getting our heads to meetings.

Our culture has an uncomfortable relationship to the body. Because America is such a wonderfully diverse place, it might be that this anti-body attitude is changing.  There’s a large Chinese community in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. It’s not unusual to see the early-morning  parks populated with older Chinese people doing slow and gentle exercises. I first learned qigong from Juliet Lee in Oakland. The series of 18 movements is not difficult to learn and they do promote a sense of wellbeing.

Workplace Wellness managers would do well to look at bringing Shibashi qigong into the workplace. It’s a potential low-cost employee benefit that is also likely to boost productivity, and who knows, it might make you smarter.