Gye Greene's Thoughts

Gye Greene's Thoughts (w/ apologies to The Smithereens and their similarly-titled album!)

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Birthday or day off

A co-worker mentioned this to me today:

At one of his old jobs, the boss worked out how much time was wasted at the office over celebrating birthday parties. He estimated that if people spent about an hour celebrating someone's birthday, that's one person-hour worth of work lost. Thus, if you have at least eight employees, that's a day's work that's wasted. And he had more than eight employees.

Thus: he told his employees that if they all agreed to not celebrate birthdays in-office (take the birthday person out to lunch, instead?), everyone could have their own birthday off. And it wouldn't count against their regular vacation time/sick leave/etc.: it was just a bonus day-off.

(If your birthday fell on a weekend, you could take the Friday or Monday off.)


Pretty clever.


--GG

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3 Comments:

At February 25, 2011 4:41 AM, Blogger IT (aka Ivan Toblog) said...

I worked at a place that gave birthdays off.
The only problem was trying to find someone to cover the shift.

 
At February 25, 2011 12:35 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Interesting idea. Of course, if you're going to give the weekend folks a Monday or Friday off (since those folks don't usually get office parties...at least in my experience) then you need to have a couple more folks at the party to break even (say 10). You'd need a couple more for folks that have the same birthday that would normally get celebrated together. With all of that, you're getting up to quite a crowd that cares enough about your birthday to stick around for an hour, rather than grab a piece of cake and run back to their desks. So while it's great for the employees, I'm not so sure the company really breaks even on the deal. -GC

 
At February 26, 2011 1:00 AM, Blogger Gye Greene said...

Guitar Cousin,

Good point. Maybe my co-worker's place was just highly social.


--GG

 

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