We’re all slacking anyway: The case for closing over Christmas
With even the most industrious of employees guilty of succumbing to the ‘Christmas click-off’, Will Cooling writes about why all firms to close over the holidays
Christmas means something different in my family than it does in other households. My parents are independent butchers in Loughborough, so the holiday period is their busiest time of year, with them both somehow finding even more hours to work in an already crowded week.
They are far from alone with many people working in the food, hospitality or retail sectors similarly experiencing a surge in trade during the Christmas period. But for everyone working in a pub busy with Christmas parties or opening up a shop on Boxing Day for the sales, there are many more people for whom Christmas and New Year is a time when work slows to a crawl.
And this is not just because people are distracted by the aforementioned Christmas shopping and parties. As people start to disappear on leave, firms lose the critical mass needed to be maximally productive; meetings are cancelled due to low attendance, progress on projects slows to a crawl as key team members are absent, trade grinds to a halt as customers and suppliers instead swap out of office emails. Even the most productive staff members succumb to ennui, given the demotivating impact of knowing that so many colleagues already have their feet up. At its most extreme you get staff members knowingly turning up to work in the full knowledge that only busywork lays ahead as they wait for management to call an early finish.
There is, however, another way. Workplaces that don’t need to be open over the Christmas period should take ownership by forcing their staff members to take time off by formally closing the business for the holidays. The resulting closure days would be deducted from the staff members’ annual leave entitlement.
The benefits such a move has for employers are significant. By coordinating a clear holiday period, it will make it easier for managers to demand normal levels of performance either side of Christmas and the New Year, and avoid situations when workers are stopped from meeting deadlines due to the absence of other staff members. Companies would be swapping leave days that may be taken when workloads are high with leave taken when workloads are at their lowest. There may also be savings in no longer pointlessly keeping half-empty offices open in terms of reduced utilities bills and less need for ancillary services such as catering or cleaning. Many firms already do this between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day, but the principle equally applies to the week before Christmas or the week after New Year’s Day.
There would also be benefits for workers as leave taken whilst a company closed down is better leave. I long worked in universities, and all of us marvelled at how more relaxing our Christmas leave was than holidays we chose at other times of the year. The whole organisation stopping meant that when we returned to work we weren’t confronted with a deluge of emails and a backlog of outstanding work that had built up.
Likewise, we didn’t have to worry about what other people were doing whilst we were away, because everyone had stopped work. Indeed, such a coordinated leave policy forced even workaholics to switch off, as what’s the point of sending emails on your own time, if they won’t be read for two weeks. There are greater benefits still, as the more having the entire holiday period off is normalised, the easier it becomes for friends and family to arrange to meet up.
Some may say that even these benefits don’t justify taking away people’s freedom of choice. But how much choice do we really have? When I take leave, it’s like most parents, dictated by when my children are on holiday from school. Alternatively, it might be to meet up with a friend who I’ve not seen for a while, or to visit family. Fundamentally, both work and play are social activities. It doesn’t make sense to leave when we take holiday from work solely to the individual, because we rely on others to be our best self whether we’re hard at work, busy partying, or just have our feet up.