Boss sees value in gentle start to week
ATikTok trend is sweeping the workplace – and it might be coming to a cubicle near you. ‘‘Bare minimum Mondays’’ is the new concept encouraging employees to take it easy on a Monday and coast by doing, well, the bare minimum and setting expectations very low from the start of the week.
Fans of the trend point out how the practice can help employees set their own pace, catch up on chores, and ease into the working week.
It sounds like a good response to the Sunday scaries or perhaps the wider problem of workplace burnout.
Caitlin Winter, a marketing manager in Australia, has implemented the practice within her team. She told news.com.au that it was ‘‘ one of the best decisions’’ she had ever made as a boss.
Winter said the benefits included staff members being able to work at their own speed, and she suggested it laid a good foundation for the rest of the week.
All staff work from home on Monday and there are no meetings scheduled, she said.
‘‘Other things that we might get to do on these days are loads of washing we didn’t get to on the weekend, grocery shopping, planning dinners for the week or walking your dog,’’ she said.
‘‘For one member of my team, it means being able to drop off and pick up her kids from school, which she is unable to do during the week,’’ Winter said.
Mia Freedman, a co-founder of the Australian women’s media company Mamamia, dismissed the idea of bareminimum Mondays on an episode of the podcast Mamamia Outloud. She opposed Winter’s way of seeing things.
‘‘On behalf of employers ... it seems like everyone’s confused about how a job works,’’ Freedman said.
‘‘You get money to do a thing, not half a thing, not a little bit of a bare minimum of a thing, not ‘quiet quitting’ the thing, not just parts of the thing you like doing, in the location you want to do it.’’
Dr Angela Lim is the chief executive of Clearhead, a mental health platform for employees and employers in New Zealand. Lim said there were better ways of addressing workplace stress.
‘‘Rather than just saying ‘bare minimum Mondays’ or ‘just do as little as you can’, it’s actually important to reframe and say: ‘What is the best way to make sure you are set up for the rest of the week?’’’
The practice sounds like a quick fix, but there might be better solutions in the long term to resolving feelings of burnout or workplace anxiety.
‘‘Ultimately, if individuals are dreading going back to work on the Monday, there is an underlying issue here – why are they feeling like this? And sometimes they actually don’t know why they are feeling so unmotivated.
‘‘Sometimes having a professional to help them work through that is helpful.’’
Lim said there were many contributing factors to an employee’s burnout or workplace wellbeing.
‘‘People just think that burnout is heavy workload. That’s not always the case.
‘‘People don’t like when there is no transparency around how they work. Leaders create space and invite people to share and be able to come with suggestions around what will get you excited and ready to jump out of bed.’’
She said most employers were now used to offering flexibility to their employees.
‘‘Post-Covid and the labour shortage has just been a reset in terms of the employment relationship, whereby employees have a bit more say in some things.
‘‘And so what is an undeniable trend is flexible working, and if you don’t provide that flexibility, then people are going to go to another employer who provides that.’’
It’s a matter of building trust between employer and employee, and understanding that this is the best way to address potential burnout, she said.
‘‘It’s just respecting that the individual is not here to scam you. The individual does want to do meaningful work and feel like they are contributing.
‘‘But you have to be respectful that people have lives outside of their jobs.’’
Heard of ‘‘bare minimum Mondays’’? The trend encourages employees to take it easy at the start of the working week as a way of preventing burnout. Jonny Mahon-Heap reports.