Something for the weekend: The Monday after a fantastic weekend can often be a real challenge in terms of employee motivation, especially if friends and family have gathered on a Sunday to celebrate a popular sporting event, such as an American football game. Heinz has pre-empted any staff productivity dips after the National Football League’s Super Bowl championship game this Sunday by giving all US employees Monday 6 February 2017 off work to recover after the excitement of the big game.
The food organisation is now calling on the US government to make this arrangement more formal, by launching an online petition that calls for the Monday after a Super Bowl game to be a national holiday.
If the online ‘Smunday’ campaign receives 100,000 signatures, it will be taken to Congress. At the time of going to press, the petition has more than 52,600 supporters.
The petition states: “We can all agree that going to work the Monday after the ‘Big Game’ on Sunday is awful. So as far as we’re concerned at Heinz, we as a nation should stop settling for it being the worst work day of the year. We don’t settle for that awesome football Sunday to be just like every other day of the year. No. We eat. We drink. And we be merry, having the tastiest times of our lives. But then the very next day, we settle for that Monday being a terrible work day.
“If we can make ‘Big Game’ Sunday awesome, we can make the Monday after awesome too. Make that Monday more like Sunday. Make it a Smunday and have more Sunday on your Monday than any of us have ever had in our lives.”
Here at Employee Benefits, we love the idea of Smunday; we bet this would be a great way to combat those Sunday evening blues. Now if only we could bring Smunday over to the UK…
