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On the first Monday of this month, millions of people woke up to an alarm beep, rubbed their eyes, and plodded off to prepare for another week of work.
At Unilever they stayed in bed. Either they went to the beach, or they got drunk on Netflix or did whatever else they wanted to do because their company had told them to take the day off.
The homeware giant offered what it called a World Appreciation Day to its workers for their months of pandemic-induced productivity.
Since much of the group’s 155,000 employees started working from home this year, the length of their average workweek has increased by about 9 percent.
About 90 percent of the employees who used to be in an office are working the same amount or more than before the closings began, the company told me last week.
Something similar may be happening at Google, which gave its staff a day off in early September.
Google’s move followed that of small American tech companies like Chegg, an online learning team, which closed for a day in April, a week in July and on Fridays during the summer to give its 1,600 workers a break. .
He took action after watching stressed staff struggle to be fully functioning parents, teachers and employees as the pandemic took hold.
“We realized we had a big problem on our hands,” says Debra Thompson, Chegg’s chief of staff.
Skeptical
It’s possible to feel sympathy for these workers and at the same time acknowledge that it could be worse – ask anyone who just lost their job or will likely lose it very soon. It’s also possible to be skeptical, as you were when I first heard about Google’s efforts.
Earlier this year, its parent company, Alphabet, became the latest tech behemoth to hit a previously unthinkable $ 1 trillion market value. Giving its relatively small workforce a day off (127,500 in June) seems eminently feasible.
On its own, it is also questionable. A day off is encouraging, but if the workload remains the same and nothing else is done, it’s hard to imagine so many changes.
Still, I give points to any company that offers such breaks, especially in a useless vacation nation like the United States, pretty much the only advanced economy that doesn’t guarantee workers a paid vacation.
On the one hand, a company-wide day off sends a signal that leaders understand burnout, a serious side effect of the pandemic no matter where people work.
Employees in a physical workplace are just as concerned about fatigue and burnout as people who work remotely, according to a survey of nearly 4,000 people in 11 countries published last month. In both cases, 43 percent said they were concerned.
Experimentation
An executive who offers a day off also seems to be the type of leader willing to experiment with other admirable measures against burnout, such as no-meeting days or, better yet, no-meeting weeks.
That word “experiment” is essential. No one really knows precisely how to manage a workforce in a crisis of this magnitude. Some ideas are destined to fail. Some will need drastic refinement.
The main thing is to try it, as the pioneers are learning on days off.
Some companies have found that if you give staff Friday off, they’ll just spend all of Saturday catching up, so more needs to be done to ease the workload.
Others think a day off works best when the entire company loses tools at once – it’s hard to disconnect from New York if you keep getting work calls from London. Uniformity is not always possible.
Unilever tried to ensure that everyone took the same day off on their World Thanksgiving. But exceptions had to be made for the finance team, which was busy finishing up the last quarterly accounts. Local holidays meant that staff in some countries took a different day off than the rest of the company.
Other companies will encounter different problems. Some will try completely different remedies. The main thing is to understand the nature of the problem and then try to fix it.
– Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2020
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