With only one day between weekend and holiday, it becomes 'sort of a limbo day.'
By Tim Mekeel
Published Jul 03, 2006 13:37
For the unlucky Lancastrians who have to work today, between a weekend and the Fourth of July holiday, it may not be a time of peak productivity.
“It becomes sort of a limbo day. ...It’s not intentional on the part of anybody, but it’s harder to focus,” said Barry Frey, past president of the Lancaster County Association of Human Resource Management.
Frey, a senior consultant for LMA Consulting Group, said productivity also could be hampered by the simple fact that many people do have today off.
“If you’re in an office job, it may be hard to contact people,” he said.
But for many workers in other fields, such as health care, retail or emergency services, it’s business as usual today.
“We don’t stop taking care of people because it’s a holiday or the day before the holiday. We have to (take care of people), and we want to. It’s our mission,” said Niki Barnes of Lancaster General Hospital.
Barnes, director of recruitment and retention, said the 5,300-employee hospital has its usual amount of staff on duty today on its clinical side.
“If anybody needs care, we’re here. They’ll get the same level of care they’d get any other day,” said Barnes. “We’re staffed and ready to respond to the needs of the community.”
However, on the hospital’s administrative side, all offices are open but have lighter staffing than normal, she said.
Darrenkamp’s supermarkets are staffed as usual today, handling the usual Monday chores of changing prices and displaying inventory, said president Joe Darrenkamp.
“When you’re in retail, you don’t have holidays,” he said, although the store will close early, at 4 p.m., on the Fourth of July.
Craig Hill of Fulton Financial echoed that perspective. When customers call or come in, the banking company needs to be ready to serve them, he said.
Not only does the company need staff people at teller windows and on the telephone-banking lines, it needs support staff behind them, he explained.
“There’s only so many people who can be off,” said Hill, senior executive vice president of Fulton Financial, with 1,200 employees in the county.
“You can’t say (to customers), ‘Our back-office people are off today.’ Or, ‘We can’t get your account information because the people in our administrative center are off today.’
“If your doors are open, you have to provide service,” he said.
That’s what Frey called “an irony of modern life.” People who have the day off want to eat out, go shopping, pick up some groceries, stop at the bank.
“And when we do, we expect there will be people to serve us. ...Just as Sundays are no longer special days of rest, no longer are holidays for many working people,” he said.
Where workers could be given a day off, though, many employers gave it to them — a wise choice, according to Northeastern University business professor Brendan Bannister.
Smart bosses gave workers today off as a way to exchange a little productivity in return for a little goodwill, said the professor.
The day off means less burnout and can “engender feelings of loyalty and commitment,” said Bannister.
Conversely, employees who are required to work could feel “that you’re not doing anything for them. Then I think that breeds resentment,” he said.
Dave Anderson, director of human resources for Clipper Magazine, said his company gave as many workers off today as possible.
Employees worked ahead of schedule to make up for being off today, he said. And helping to ease the task, the workload this time of year is at a seasonal low, he added.
As a result, only half of the 750 workers in the company’s Lancaster headquarters were at work today, said Anderson, immediate past president of the human resource management association.
Still, his company couldn’t let everybody have today off.
“If everyone decided to take a long weekend, we’d be in trouble...,” he said. “We do have a deadline and a publish date. Our magazines don’t stop because it’s the Fourth of July.”
(The Associated Press contributed to this story.)
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