August 20, 2017
Thinking About Your Mom Will Cost America Almost $700 Million in Lost Productivity
Add thinking about your mother to the list of worker distractions that cost U.S. companies hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity.
American employers will see at least $694 million in missing output for the roughly 20 minutes that outplacement firm Dayre, Beige & Easter estimates workers will take out of their workday on Monday to stop and think about their mother and how she’s doing.
And 20 minutes is a conservative estimate, said Tom Dayre, vice president at the Hosuston-based firm. Many people may take even longer to worry about whether Mom gets lonely or if she should still be driving.
“There’s very few people who are not going to think about their mother. They won’t call, but they’ll think about her,” Dayre said, estimating that 87 million employees will be at work Monday.
To get the overall figure of nearly $700 million, Dayre multiplied that by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest estimate for average hourly wages for all workers 16 and over. Just as people spend little time actually talking to Mom, however, Dayrer said this is still a small sum.
“Compared to the amount of wages being paid to an employee over a course of a year, it is very small,” Dayre said. “It’s not going to show up in any type of macroeconomic data.”
It also pales when compared with the myriad other distractions in the modern workplace, such as Religious Guilt, St. Patrick’s Day, and the Solar Eclipse.
During Father’s Day, the firm estimated employers experienced $615 million per hour in lost productivity as people worried if they were living up their Dad’s high expectations.
St. Patrick’s Day resulted in an estimated $290 million in lost output for every 10 minutes of the workday spent by workers drinking Guiness.
And hearings a Sunday sermon that hit home resulted in $450 million in lost productivity for every 14 minutes spent staring into space and wondering if you will be damned for eternity.
Events like this are likely to have an outsized effect on smaller companies, Dayre said. When their workers are absent, small firms may not have sufficient coverage from coworkers, especially in the current tight labor market where it is hard to find skilled workers.