The beginning of the week before Christmas is traditionally when most workers are already mentally gone. According to research carried out before the pandemic by Peakon, the human resources analysis group, up to 57% of British workers admitted that they were no longer as involved at work by this time.
Some were shopping online. Others were planning Christmas Day or a vacation. More than 10% of employees were taking longer lunch breaks and nearly 20% of them were leaving work earlier than usual.
This was by no means an exclusive UK phenomenon. In the US, most employees expected to lose concentration at work on December 16, while UK workers lasted until December 18 and Germans followed a day later.
As it happens, younger workers were more likely to disconnect earlier than older ones. In the UK, more than a third of workers aged 18-34 said festive distractions would reduce their productivity by December 12. By December 15, that number had risen to almost half, according to Peakon, which was acquired last year by Workday HR, the software group.
Does any of this matter? For an industry like retail that relies heavily on the Christmas business, it obviously matters.
But it’s a different story for companies in sectors that normally slow towards the end of the year, some of which not only accepted the inevitability of the Christmas shutdown but turned it into an incentive for staff.
UK PR agency Jargon has offered its staff an extra day of Christmas shopping for the last 10 years and Kevin Winfield, associate director at the firm, says the benefit makes even more sense this year.
“For many of our clients, their industries tend to slow down at this time of year and, especially since the pandemic, many companies have accepted the need to close over the festive period to give their teams time off,” he says.
It is not entirely clear what has happened since the pandemic. Workday says it did not follow up on Peakon’s investigation into the Christmas slump in work activity.
But there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that despite the cost-of-living crisis and the lingering threat of Covid, this year’s festive period has been even more distracting than others.
In the UK, social media has been awash with images of huge queues outside everything from Christmas markets to student parties in bars, as people gather at events free of Covid restrictions.
In Japan, authorities are reportedly bracing for a spike in the death toll of partygoers falling asleep on the road, as office workers gather for the New Year’s Eve celebrations that many avoided during the pandemic.
Elsewhere, many people also headed to their first office Christmas party since 2019, with not always ideal results.
There have been reports of a notoriously raucous Christmas season in Dublin, where people were faced with fights, drunks and puddles of vomit as they took to the streets to celebrate.
More trouble has erupted in Australia, where a TV presenter revealed last week that he had checked himself into a center to get help for alcohol problems after offending his female colleagues at a gathering after a Christmas party in the office on Saturday night.
“I am beyond heartbroken and devastated to learn that I have offended my colleagues after our Christmas party,” said Chris Smith, who was suspended from both a Sky News Australia television show and a replacement season at the station. 2GB radio after the unhappy Saturday in question. The women “did not deserve such drunken treatment,” he added.
The fallout from this particular Christmas event has obviously been remarkable, but I’d be surprised if Smith is the only person whose December cheer ends badly this year.
Ultimately though, he is in the minority. Whether you started the Christmas holidays early or continued to work as busy as ever, this December is the closest many of us have come to a resumption of normal life in three years. And that’s something to celebrate, even if it takes some getting used to again.
