During the last few days I have spent at my current employer, I have observed with interest the rate of output from my team members and other colleagues that made me start to question the value of having people work during the festive season, trying hard not to be too academic about my views, I browsed quickly online to see if there are any academic articles that deal with this subject. I uncovered over 500 thousand articles on google scholar alone related by just typing worker productivity during December as keywords.

Studies generally state that employees spent about 50-60% of their time at work not sitting at their desks, from my observation this December these numbers increased dramatically in during the festive season. I would probably say employees performed more closely to the 80% mark away from their desk during that period and even when they happen to be at their desks, the amount of productive time is marginally lower than during the rest of the year.

Research suggests that out of an average eight-hour (8) day, the average worker is only productive for 3 hours during ‘normal’ days. During the December period I would dare to posit that this probably reduces to less than half, thus an average worker would only be productive for about an hour during the entire 8 hours of working time. This I gathered from the increased noise levels from people holding year end functions, increased leave, absence and people generally discussing more issues unrelated to work than issues related to work.

Discussions tend to go about who is going on leave, when, when they are coming back and what they are going to do during break etc. Talk becomes less about work and more about social issues. All in all, productivity suffers here, which leads me to my Question:

Why do companies bother having people around in their offices during this time?

I think companies would save much more money with people out of their offices than within. All the electricity, coffee, water and other utilities like toilet supplies, they can save on if people are not in the office and can make up for having them present. Not to mention the leave taken which reduces the burden on leave day pay-outs and other wellness benefits.

I conclude that companies should basically make December a two-week month and arguably the same reasoning can be upheld for January as well, especially because no one feels like working on the first two-weeks of January anyway.