DEBATE: Should more businesses consider offering ‘hangover days’?

Should more businesses consider offering ‘hangover days’?

Claire Crompton, director of The Audit Lab, says YES.

Hangover days are essentially sexed-up working from home days. We offer them to allow employees the flexibility to be accountable for their own productivity and targets. We are decisively anti-micro management, and trust the people who work for us.

This flexible approach promotes wellbeing and honesty between staff and managers, where historically there may have been tension. In return, we’ve seen an increase in staff morale and work output. We have shown that focusing on employees’ happiness and clients’ commercial goals don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

Our goal is to build a business where people build a career, not just a stepping stone, so staff retention and loyalty is one of our highest priorities. Our people appreciate the chance to be honest, they love the perks we offer because we treat them like real people with lives outside of the office. And ultimately, they have stayed with us and progressed through the business because of it.

Happy team, happy business, happy clients.

Benedict Spence, a freelance writer, says NO.

You are currently reading a newspaper put together by people either experiencing a hangover or caffeine crash, or possibly still a little drunk. It’s a testament to the sterling work that can be done under such circumstances, therefore, that it is in your hands at all and is halfway coherent.

Ever thus has it been that people in varying degrees of degradation have cracked on with the day’s business after a heavy night.

Working remotely is not a bad thing per se — when incorporated as part of a routine, it can reap benefits. But if you are physically incapable of getting to work, then you are ill. And employees should not work when ill. If, on the other hand, you are just hungover, then you are fit to go in. Companies should not reward behaviour that affects productivity by indulging that behaviour, allowing the lack of productivity to occur under the covers.

As a general rule, consider this: plenty of good work can be done in bed, but only the self-employed should ever profit from it.

Main image credit: Getty