Valentine's Day or Do Holidays Affect Productivity?

The first few months of the year are filled with holidays that celebrate new beginnings and love. While this is certainly positive in one's personal life, is it possible that these holidays have a bigger effect on your employees than you might have previously considered? With Valentine's Day right around the corner, we at CleverControl decided it was time to find out the effect the celebration of love had on employees.

When it comes to Valentine's Day and your employees, here are a few things you should be aware of.

While Valentine's day can be a cause of celebration for those in relationships, many will experience negative feelings regarding this holiday. Most commonly, studies have shown that Valentine's day can often act as a trigger of loneliness.

Loneliness should not be confused with being alone, as it is a feeling that can be experienced even by those in crowded spaces. Those who experience loneliness are more likely to feel disconnected and disengaged from whatever is going on in their surrounding area.

If one of your employees, who is usually engaged and present in all discussions, suddenly changes their behavior during this time, it is probably because the holidays have triggered some negative emotions, such as loneliness within them.

Self-esteem can frequently be affected by the holiday spirit, especially when that spirit relates to being wanted and loved by someone else. It is most common for your single employees to feel like their self-esteem is lower during Valentine's Day. As a result, you might find that they are withdrawn or less open about their opinions.

As every opinion and employee in your company is valuable, it will be up to you to help bring up those employees that are feeling the holiday blues.

In our search for true definitive results on the effects of Valentine's Day on productivity, we asked two CleverControl clients to share the productivity statistics from their employees for the week before February 14th, 2022, and the week of the holiday. These statistics proved enlightening in the distractions most employees face during this holiday.

We found that the week before Valentine's day, there was an increase in searches relating to gift buying. Our first client's statistics showed that Amazon, Walmart, and Opentable were three of the six most used websites unrelated to work. The most used unproductive apps were Spotify, Discord, and WhatsApp. This data showed a clear direction in the distractions that employees mainly had to face, with most of them searching for the perfect gift for their significant others.

This trend was also present in the statistics of our second client, where the top results were Amazon, Etsy, and fromyouflowers.com.

The close to two hundred company employees that the two companies have collectively also had significant similarities in the most common searches they had to make that were unrelated to work.

For Company A, the most common search queries were:

• Valentine's Day gift ideas

• Valentine's day chocolate

• Valentine's gift for boyfriend

• Valentine's date ideas

• heart-shaped necklace

• romantic playlist Spotify

• romantic playlist YouTube

• book a restaurant near me

For Company B, the most common search queries were:

• gift ideas for husband

• Valentine day plush

• heart shaped chocolate

• order flowers and cake online

• order flowers online

This report shows a clear pattern in the type of searches that employees will be most likely to make even during their work hours before Valentine's Day. Depending on how quick an employee is in making decisions and how committed to their work they are, these searches might take them a few minutes or even hours to complete. This is important to remember as it can be the key to unlocking the effects of distractions on your employees' productivity.

While we have established that Valentine’s Day has a direct effect on people’s mental health which could change the way they handle their work, as well as the distractions that may be pulling their attention during the holidays, that does not necessarily mean that their productivity is affected to a great extent.

According to our CleverControl statistics provided by the two companies mentioned above, we have noticed that there is a slight change in productivity between the two weeks.

Company A, which has around 140 employees, for the week between February 7 and February 11, 2022, had a productivity percentage of 58%. The following week the productivity percentage went up to 62%.

Company B, which has around 25 employees, for the same week of Feb 7 to Feb 11 had a productivity percentage of 83%, while the following week, the productivity percentage had increased to 85%.

This comparison clearly shows that while these distractions do have a slight effect on the productivity of your employees, it is by no means a bit of enough productivity gap to cause enough concern. Instead, it is much better if you check the behaviors of your employees to ensure that they are engaged actively in the work you do during the holidays rather than focusing too much of your energy on the minuscule loss of productivity.

Besides, people tend to feel reinvigorated after the holidays, which could potentially also lead to an increase in productivity later on.

According to both the statistics provided by our clients and our research, Valentine's Day does not appear to have a significant effect on a company's productivity levels. However, with any holiday comes the opportunity to connect with your employees and help make sure that they are mentally in a good place, which will allow them to be more active and contributing members of your team. In the long run, this is going to be the best thing you can focus on if you want to increase their productivity.