17 million forecast to call in sick day after Super Bowl

More than 100 million people are expected to tune in Sunday to the Super Bowl matchup between the New England Patriots and Los Angeles Rams, noshing on too much food, drinking too much beer and staying up too late to see the latenight ads that run in the fourth quarter.

Then Monday, more than 17 million of them plan to stay home from work.

That’s according to a survey commissioned by The Workforce Institute at Kronos Incorporated, a software company that helps companies with human resources management. It surveyed 1,107 U.S. adults, and estimates, based on extrapolations of U.S. workforce data, that some 17.2 million people could skip work as a result, a figure that eclipses the absences it estimated would occur in 2018 or 2016. That’s the highest number in the five or six times it’s run the survey since 2005.

It’s known as the “Super Bowl Fever,” the “Super Sick Monday” or even “Smunday,” as Kraft called it in a 2017 publicity move, when it gave employees the Monday after the Super Bowl off and started a petition trying to make it a national holiday. And whether the effect of the big game on Monday morning is to turn corporate cube farms into ghost towns, there are signs of a productivity hit.

“I’m a former corporate recruiter, and the Monday after the Super Bowl there were always more notable absences,” said Vicki Salemi, the careers expert at job site Monster.com, which also ran a recent small survey of hiring managers, recruiters and job seekers and found that 12 percent said they had called in sick the day after the Super Bowl to recover from celebrating.

The cost of productivity loss could top $4 billion, according to an estimate by the outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. That includes time people spend gabbing about Tom Brady’s performance, combined with those who stay home from work.