Reasons Why There Should Be No Work On Sat

Here I am sitting in the office on a perfectly fine Saturday morning, bemoaning the fact that I have to drag my sorry ass to the office at 9:00am. While working on some Saturdays which you actually have work to clear is fine, it is often more a case of showing face and satisfying the punch-in machine on Saturdays.

I know people during our parents and grandparents time worked Saturdays and possibly infact EVERYDAY in order to survive and make ends meet for the family; and particularly during these tumultuous economic times, one must be grateful to simply have a job and keep it. Afterall there are constant bills waiting to be paid in the mailbox and financial commitments to be met (and folks who would probably be happy to have your job if you didn't want it). Yes, it would be really bad news to be out of a job in such times.

Coming back to my original grouse, there are two (2) primary reasons why I feel that making people come back to the office on Saturday is counter-productive to an organization:

One (1) - If there's no real pressing work to be done, people are just going to come in to the office, surf the web, read the magazines, munch munch munch and yak yak yak... the office is effectively a corporate picnic field with the company picking up the tab for the utilities AKA keeping the air-con on, electricity for lights, computers and what-nots.
*The good thing though that comes out of this, is the bonding time between colleagues that is often not possible during busy weekdays!

Two (2) - Because people are not completely rested coming back from the weekend, more often than not, they will show symptoms of 'Monday Blues' and be sluggish for at least the first half of Monday. As a result, companies will not be able to derive 100% economic benefit of having their workers 100% productive for a full eight hours. People are gonna take time to warm up and rev up their engines and psychologically, energy levels are just gonna be a tad lower as compared to if people are well rested and just raring to go for the week and scale new heights for the company and themselves.
*This theory only works if the company has sufficient honest hardworking folks who will put in their fair share (if not more) of work once they are sufficiently rested.

If abolishing work completely on a Saturday is a hard-to-swallow notion by management, perhaps companies can consider the option of working-from-home on a Saturday; companies will benefit from the resultant goodwill from staff, saves the company $$$ in resources, staff will feel more rested over the weekend and the company would be doing a good turn to the environment, with reduced petrol and gas emission from travelling to and from the office!