Friday, April 1, 2011

Casual Fridays costing your company $$$

"Today is Friday, yesterday was Thursday, tomorrow is Saturday"....


This post was inspired by Jason when he mentioned about "casual Fridays". I started to think about Fridays at work and how people generally slack off on Fridays. I work in an office environment and you can definitely notice a lot of casual chatter and laughter by the afternoon on Fridays. I thought to myself:
"How much money does a company lose when employee-productivity decreases because of the 'Slack-Friday syndrome'?"

This question lead me to also include how much money is lost because of "Groggy Mondays"

Imagine you are the CEO of Company A. It employs 100 people. Each employee works for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Each employee gets paid $10 an hour.

Here are some calculations:
Total wages paid to employees per day:
8 hr/day
x $10/hr
x 100 employees
= $8000/day
This $8000/day you pay to all employees is assuming each person is working efficiently on work-related material for 8 hrs/day.

  • Let's assume that "Groggy Mondays" (GM) and "Slack Fridays" (SF) both cut out half of the productive hours. This means on Mondays and Fridays, employees are only working productively for 4 hours each day. 
  • So that means, you will be paying employees for 8 hrs of work when they only produce 4 hrs of work. In monetary terms, you pay $8000/day but you only get $4000/day of worth. Therefore, you are losing $4000.
  • Let's assume that employees are fully productive from Tuesdays to Thursdays.
  • In a work week, it will cost you ($8000/day x 5 days) = $40,000 in wages for employees. You lose $4000 for each GM and SF. Therefore $8000 in total is lost because of decreased productivity on GM and SF.  
 If extrapolated across an entire year, ($8000 x 52 weeks)=$416,000 is lost annually due to GMs and SFs. Now that's a lot of money lost that could have went to employee benefits or executive bonuses....

If you were a company CEO or manager, what would YOU do to reduce or eliminate money lost due to decreased productivity from "Groggy Mondays" and "Slack Fridays"?

2 comments:

  1. Get rid of GM and SF and just have Tues to Thurs! :P

    but eventually you'd have GT (groggy Tues) and STh (Slack Thursday), then you're hooped :P

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  2. I'm taking an workplace psychology class right now and we covered some of this in class. You can't assume that people will be actively productive even in the mid week days. Whenever people r tired, they'll take breaks, whether they're allowed to or not. Its not within the management's power to control that. The wages lost are, in a sense, hard to avoid. I learned about Flextime (employees start later in the day but same number of hours), which could be implemented on mondays to reduce groggy-ness. On fridays, I think that if the CEO were to create a kind of intimate, casual and permissive culture that allowed workers to "take it a bit easier" on fridays, the workers may feel more commited to their company and thus more motivated to work harder during the week. Coming down hard on the employees about slackin on fridays would just breed resentment towards the company, making the workers want to work even less for them.

    I say, let them slack, buy them coffee and donuts and let them chit chat. Making the company come off in a positive light and creating a comfortable culture around work can actually increase motivation n productivity!

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