Category Archives: Benefits

The 3 Rules About Kissing Your Boss!

Posted on by
7

May 20, 2013 I published a silly little post on my blog called “The Rules About Hugging at Work”. The post might have taken me twenty minutes to write. It was just an idea I got, like thousands of others, I thought it was funny, so I wrote about it. To date, it’s been read over 1 Million times. Huff Post picked it up, it went viral on LinkedIn (I got over 1300 comments), I’ve been interviewed and called, “The World’s Foremost Expert on Workplace Hugging”.

Twenty minutes of writing, a throwaway idea.

Months later I posted the exact same post on LinkedIn’s publishing platform. This was before everyone could publish (remember that), you had to be invited. I got a call from the LinkedIn chief editor offering me access. I didn’t know if it was really anything so I just threw up old posts I had already written but added a few new pieces.

On the Hugging post, I added at the bottom my next post would be: The 3 Rules About Kissing Your Boss! as a joke. I never wrote it. Until five years later I got a message last week from someone who found the hugging post for the first time asking how they could find the kissing post! I didn’t even know what they were talking about!

So, here’s the kissing post! 

It would be easy to dismiss the notion of kissing your boss as something that would never happen. When I say ‘never’ I mean never. I mean honestly do any of us ever feel it would be appropriate to kiss your boss!?

This one is hard for me. I come from a family of huggers and kissers! My father is 73 and he still kisses me on the lips when I greet him or say goodbye. Some folks would find that super weird. Different cultures do different things.

My son was overseas this summer visiting friends in Belgium and it was quite common for new people he met to give him that traditional kiss on the cheek, but he said those same people would not give you a hug or a handshake. This kiss on the cheek greeting is very common in many parts of the world.

In America, you would probably get punched in the face if you tried kissing someone on the cheek you were meeting for the first time! I mean, look, if I don’t know you, I certainly don’t want your germs all over my face! Most Europeans I meet for business purposes in the states who come here often have gotten used to handshakes, rarely do I see one of them do the cheek kiss greeting.

All of this is way different, though, then kissing your boss! Kissing your boss would have to be a special circumstance or special occasion. I’m guessing if you’re kissing your boss one of a few things probably hasn’t happened in that relationship. You’ve probably become very good friends, some once in a lifetime event is happening, or you’ve become romantically involved, in which case, not really your boss any longer!

So, if we can see a time in which you might kiss your boss, the great HR pro in me says we better put some pen to policy and make some rules! Here are my three rules for kissing your boss:

1. No kissing on the lips. Kissing on the lips is slippery slope you can’t put back in the bag! Wants that happens you might as well just get undressed, stuff just got real! We’re going to assume this kiss is not romantic in nature, completely as professional as kissing your boss can be professional!

2. Do not leave moisture on your bosses cheek. Okay, somehow we got down this rabbit hole to a point where I’m kissing my boss on his or her cheek, let’s not make this super awkward by leaving a nice big wet spot on the side of their face. If you’re so excited to be kissing your bosses cheek that you leave it wet, you should be checked into a mental ward.

3. Do not have bad breath. First impressions are critical and even though your boss knows you, your boss doesn’t know the kissing you. Do not go in for that first boss kiss with bad breath! I love Ice Breakers Mints and I have some close by almost always. Why? I can’t stand bad breath. Coffee breath is the worst and I know a lot of you are major coffee drinkers! Guess what? Diet Mt Dew breath smells like a flower garden! Think about that next time go for a fill up at the coffee station at work!

See? That’s how you do it. That’s how the World’s Foremost Expert in Workplace Hugging becomes the World’s Foremost Expert on Boss Kissing. You can’t be a one-trick pony in this world folks, we all need to keep striving on reinventing ourselves. Watch out fall conference circuit! If you see Sackett coming I might have just raised the game!

So, hit me in the comments. What are your rules for kissing your boss!?

What Would You Ask For If Your Workplace Went Union?

Posted on by
2

If you didn’t see it last week a Nissan automotive plant in Mississippi went through a union vote deciding on whether the 6,000 workers at the plant wanted to represented by the UAW. It’s 2017, right? Is it just me or does it seem strange that we are still having union votes?

Here’s what the Nissan workers who support the union vote say they are looking for:

“Union supporters complain that the company has been stingy with benefits and bonuses, that workers on the production line are pressured to sacrifice safety to keep the line moving briskly, and that supervisors arbitrarily change policies about discipline and attendance.”

So, basically:

  • Pay
  • Benefits
  • Retirement
  • Safety

The UAW is trying to make this out about race. Be careful thinking this is the real issue. When you have a predominantly diverse workforce it’s an easy tactic to use to drum up votes. This is about the UAW increasing membership, period. They could care less about race issues, pay issues, or safety issues, just come ask all the out of work former UAW members in Flint! The UAW would try and unionize a girl scout troop if it increased their coffers.

Have you been in a modern day automotive plant? You could eat off the floors. There are so many safety precautions in place you would have to be blind to put yourself in harm’s way. The average UAW employee makes twice the average salary of an American worker. These workers don’t need a union, they need a reality check.

This got me thinking though of what I might ask for if my company decided to go union. Or, what would any of us in a modern society ask for from a union? The reality is in today’s world with the current competitive talent landscape there really isn’t much a union can offer. Pay and benefits are pretty competitive, pensions are no longer viable with current life expectancies, and laws are in place to protect workers from most safety issues.

Here’s what I think most people would want from a modern union:

– Flexibility in working hours. Not work from home, although in many cases that could be argued, but the ability to be treated as an adult when it comes to my schedule and getting my work done. It’s not too much to ask to allow me to drop my kids at school at 8 am then come into work by 8:30 am. Just because you want everyone at the office by 8 am, doesn’t mean it has to be that way. That’s just silly. Not all of your employees are living the same life.

– Different Financial Benefit Options for Time in Life. A college graduate with student debt needs different financial benefits than your employees who are ten years away from retirement. A recently married employee looking to buy a house has different financial needs than the employee having his first kid go off to college. Having one company 401K match no longer makes sense to all of your employees.

– Diet Mt. Dew Fountain Machine. Unions are stupid so I might as well ask for stupid stuff! If you want to represent me, you better install a Diet Mt. Dew fountain machine in the break room or will not get my vote and union dues. I’m paying you $17.63 out of every check for what? No, Diet Dew?! That’s not happening!

– College Education or Free Skill Training for my Kids. Oh, wait, now I’m listening. Don’t you think if unions are truly invested in their members that they should be able to invest the dues and make this happen? We’re talking billions of dollars per year paid in union dues across America, for a very little amount of negotiating every few years. If you can guarantee my kids a college education or to learn a trade, now you’re earning your keep!

What would you ask from a union in today’s world?

 

T3 – @Globoforce pre-launches Life Events #WorkHuman

Posted on by
1

Hey, last week I was at WorkHuman powered by Globoforce and they had a new product launch that kind of left many in the audience in tears! How often can you say that about a tech launch – take a look:

So, Life Events is designed to increase the quality of your work relationships. Some of us are lucky enough to have this naturally in our work environments, and we completely take it for granted when we have it.

Here’s what Eric Mosley, Globoforces CEO, had to say about Life Events:

“The lines between an employee’s life and work are constantly blending—more so now than ever before,” said Eric Mosley, CEO of Globoforce. “Our goal through Conversations and Life Events is to encourage more human-focused interactions that help create a community of growth, collaboration, and inclusion. If we work in environments where we can trust our managers to have our best interest top of mind and feel strong connections with our colleagues, we are more likely to actively participate in our success, our colleagues and the companies we work for.”

I truly believe that most people want to live one life. They want to be the same person at work as they are at home. Technology like this helps build that bridge. Job satisfaction, engagement, etc. all tend to rise as we feel we have stronger connections at work.

Does this change the world? No, probably not, but it might just make your work world a little better. I thought it was one of the more unique features I’ve seen in the space for a while and it definitely plays to a workforce that is comfortable with sharing their lives via video. While you might not be, the majority of our upcoming workforce is.

Coming later this year, check it out on the Globoforce platform.  (BTW – all the people in the video are actual Globoforce employees, and the story is completely real!)

T3 – Talent Tech Tuesday – is a weekly series here at The Project to educate and inform everyone who stops by on a daily/weekly basis on some great recruiting and sourcing technologies that are on the market.  None of the companies who I highlight are paying me for this promotion.  There are so many really cool things going on in the tech space and I wanted to educate myself and share what I find.  If you want to be on T3 – just send me a note – timsackett@comcast.net

Hyperlocal Hiring

Posted on by
3

The BLS reports that 80% of hourly workers live within 5 miles of where they work. Snagajob’s 2017 State of the Hourly Workforce survey found that 70% of our hourly workers refuse to commute more than 30 minutes to work. When you take a look at your own total workforce, my guess is you’ll find the vast majority live very close to your place of employment.

Blue collar, white collar, it doesn’t matter. People would prefer, for the most part, to live fairly close to work so they don’t waste a ton of time commuting. Commuting hours are for the most part one of the biggest drags on balance. Sure you can be productive on your commute, but it’s not really what you would prefer to be doing!

I’m wondering what it would be like if an organization started “Hyperlocal Hiring”? What if you only hired people who were willing to live within 1 mile of your place of employment? Maybe 2 or 3 miles, but not more, the idea is you could walk or bike to work in a reasonable time.

I know of some local government services that already require this in certain positions. I knew a Fire Chief who worked for a city and one requirement of the job was he had to live within the city limits. This was a rather small town, so he was within that 3-mile distance for sure!

Play along with me for a second!

We already know that the millennial and GenZ workforce like to work for companies that have community involvement. If your employees work in the communities they live in, it makes it pretty easy for organizations to truly support their local community. High engagement equals longer tenure, increased productivity, etc.

The Advantages of Hyperlocal Hiring:

– Hyper-short commutes give employees better work-life balance

– Living close to co-workers build more natural, deeper relationships (if you have a best friend at work…)

– Working and living in the same community gives you a stronger tie to both, increasing tenure.

– It would seem the living/working in close proximity would drive a stronger culture as well.

Okay, I know you’re already poking holes in this theory, but just imagine this for a few minutes on the positive side. It could be extremely cool!

I’m sure an organization with 10,000 employees couldn’t pull this off as it would be super difficult and expensive to have housing for 10,000 employees in a mile or two radius of your place of employment. SMB organizations, on the other hand, could use this as a huge advantage in hiring and attracting that younger workforce. Of course, this also works better in urban settings, but I could imagine a billionaire building their own city!

Dan Gilbert, Quicken Loans founder, basically went up and bought much of downtown Detroit and then moved this headquarters there. 5,000+ employees, modern company, downtown Detroit! If you don’t know the area, you either live a mile or two from the headquarters, or you drive out 30 miles to the suburbs.

There’s nothing that stops you from making a proximity of where someone lives a condition of employment. As long as it’s contractually agreed to up front, you would be fine. You can’t go tell someone they’ll be fired unless they move closer to your office, but new hires coming in can have this condition.

I know most of us would say, well, you’ll limit your candidate pool, so you just can’t do this. That’s my point! I want to limit my candidate pool to others who share this vision with me. To work and build a community in a micro-community with all of us involved! Yeah, Hippies! Come join the commune, but in a very modern, free-will, capitalist sense of being!

What do you think? Would you ever want to be Hyperlocal employee?

The 5 Skills I Honed From Other Jobs That Have Served Me Well in my HR Career

Posted on by
3

Believe it or not, I didn’t go to college thinking, “Oh boy! I can’t wait to work in HR!” And there’s a pretty decent chance you didn’t either.

Eventually, if you’re like me, you got some official HR education under your belt. But a lot of the skills you use every day are skills you probably didn’t learn for the first time in an HR class. You learned them before all that—at home, or at some earlier job, right?

Here’s how it went for me:

My undergrad degree was in elementary education. Back then, my goal in life was to teach your kids how to finger paint and blow up stuff in science class. At the time it seemed like the best gig on the planet. Kids are easy to make laugh and I got my summers off. That all seemed pretty awesome. Plus, being a dude in elementary education, meant it was usually me and like 30 female teachers in the school. I wasn’t the best looking guy, so I liked those odds!

After doing a little teaching, I moved into sales and recruiting for a while. I’m a mile wide and inch deep, as they say, so I was able to carry on a conversation about just about anything. So, those two careers worked really well, because it’s pretty much just getting people to trust you and then talk them into something where they’ll never trust you again!

Then, to my good fortune, I sort of fell into HR. When I was in recruiting, one of my clients was an HR leader for General Motors. He took a liking to me and I thought he had the best job on the planet, so he encouraged me to get my master’s in HR and he would help me get a real HR gig.

When I got my first job in HR, what I found was that all of the skills I learned being a teacher, a sales pro, and a recruiter were all skills I that really helped me in HR. Here’s five in particular that have come in handy.

Being Confident: Turns out elementary age school kids can smell fear like a pack of wild dogs! When you step into a classroom and you lack confidence these little monsters will attack! So I had to learn very quickly as a teacher that even if I didn’t really need to know anything about what I was trying to teach, everything would be okay as long as I controlled the room with confidence.

Similarly, in HR, people will question you constantly, unless you can portray similar confidence in your abilities. And compared to a pack of eight-year-olds, they’re pretty tame by comparison!

A Good Attitude:  When I got into HR people kept telling me, “Hey, you’re not like every other HR person I know!” What they were saying was, you’re always positive, most HR pros come across negative. (Which I don’t think is fair.) My first job out of college was as an agency recruiter. You better have a great attitude in that job, or you’ll fail for sure!

Being Proactive: A lot of HR folks see their jobs as being firefighters. In other words, they wait for problems, and then try to solve them. When I got into HR, I decided I didn’t want to think that way. I wanted to be proactive. Nothing was ever good enough, we needed to make it better. Everything was broken because I just broke it, so we could make it better. I found as a recruiter early in my career the engineering hiring managers I worked with had thoughts like this and responded well when I came at them with ideas in the same mindset.

Being Humble: How can you be confident and humble? It’s hard, but you can do it. As a teacher, you have to do what you say, or your kids will never let you forget. Their memory is a like an elephant’s! The best sales pros are also very humble in a way you feel connected with them, that makes them relatable. The best HR pros are reliably humble. You can count on them and admire their willingness to put the organization’s needs in front of their own.

Being Persuasive: As a teacher, I had to ‘sell’ ideas to kids thousands of times per week. As a recruiter, I had to sell jobs to candidates all day, every day. And having the ability to sell ideas and projects sets great HR pros apart from average HR pros.

Why were these skills important for me to learn? They all help get the tools and technology I needed to be a great HR Pro!  These skills help make me build a story around how we are going to get better and eventually become world-class. I want those that I support and those who support me to truly believe the only choice we have to get better is to take Tim’s advice and go get that technology solution!

(P.S. If you want more ideas on how to convince your boss to give you the budget for cool new stuff, download this eBook I wrote.) —

Anyway, that’s how it went for me. How about you? What skills did you never learn in HR-school have been the most important to you? Please share in the comments below.

(Oh, and if you’d like to read more interesting posts on how to bring more of the soft skills you learned outside HR to your job, check out this awesome blog post right now:

6 Tips on Creating a More Empathetic Leave of Absence Process,  by my friend, the excellent Dawn Burke, VP of People for Daxko!

The Single Best Incentive You Can Offer Millennials!

Posted on by
3

The world is millennial crazy. If you read this blog you know I think about 99% of the millennial stuff is pure B.S. (we were all young once, it’s mostly great, but sometimes sucks, buy a helmet!), but every once in a while I find something that really hits home.

Student debt is the real deal!

I’ve gotten up close in personal with this. I have two kids in college who are just starting down this debt path. I also have a brother who is a millennial who gets punched in the gut each month he has to make his mortgage-sized student loan payment! Great white collar, professional career, well paid, can’t even think about buying a house. That sucks!

Take a look at his chart:

So, if you truly want to attract great millennial talent you need to do a couple of things:

1. Offer as a sign-on to pay off their student debt.

2. Offer home buying, mortgage assistance.

Why? Turns out employees who own a home, stay around a lot longer, are more productive, and I work for a company that cares enough about me to help me with my student loans and to buy a house, I’m probably a bit more engaged as well!

Here’s the other dirty little secret we know in HR. Let’s say you have a program that pays off student loan debt for employees. With those agreements, you usually have an amount per year payoff (I.E., We pay off $30K, you give us three years of service, or pay us back the money, or something along those lines).

Very few employees leave you after they’ve been employed with an organization for three years. Three years is that tipping point where you decide you’re all in, or all out. So, your job as an HR leader is to get them past three years! Okay, every organization has their own tenure tipping point, but on average most are around three years. Go find yours!

One other item from the chart that sticks out like a sore thumb? No college degree means you’ll more than likely never own a home. That sucks! Guess what, we all have people in our organization without college degrees. These folks need our help with major financial situations, like buying a home, more than any of our employees.

We should be able to figure this out as well. What would stop an employer from offering home buying assistance, for years of service, to their employees? Nothing. But we don’t do it because we see ‘those’ employees as easily replaceable. So, why put in the extra effort?

Employees are our most valuable asset, well, unless, you know, you only make $15 per hour, then you’re just an asset, not really that valuable. Isn’t that what we’re really saying?

Long, story, short: Help your employees buy homes. You’ll never regret it.

 

Why Won’t Your Employees Go See The Doctor?

Posted on by
3

So, we have few major psychological issues that come into play when drag our feet in not going to see the doctor when we need to.

1. We don’t have the time! Ugh, these doctor offices are all run by former DMV or post office workers who were fired for poor performance in being too slow! We know if we go to the doctor’s office we’ll miss a half a day or more of work.

2. Yuck, sick people! Apparently, doctor’s offices are filled with sick people. You’re sick too, but just not that sick! I’ve got a cold, I don’t want some disease I’ll die from!

3. What if something is really wrong with me? I don’t want to know! I’m always surprised by this but it’s an actual thing. People would rather ignore a serious health issue, then to actually deal with it.

I’m definitely a number 1 & 2 person. I don’t have the time and I don’t want to be around sick people. So, going to the doctor is basically an ambulance ride for me! Meaning, I’m not going unless they drag me out in an ambulance!

That’s why I fell in love with seeing a doctor on my iPhone! One of the coolest things I’ve done in a while! Check it out:

If you haven’t tried it with your insurance company, you need to! So, simple. So, fast. It’s life changing for people like me!

Hit me in the comments about your experiences. Also, I would love to hear the kinds of things people have used this service for. Mine was a simple sinus infection and some antibiotics. The early adopter in me wants to know how far I can go with this service! Can I meet with a therapist and get an Adderall script? What about Viagra? I don’t need it, but a bet a bunch of dudes would rather do this over the phone than in person!

The early adopter in me wants to know how far I can go with this service! Can I meet with a therapist and get an Adderall script? What about Viagra? I don’t need it, but a bet a bunch of dudes would rather do this over the phone than in person! What about back pain? Can I get narcotics over the phone? That could be a game changer!

Free Frozen Yogurt is Always a Great Union Buster!

Posted on by
Reply

If you’ve read any of my posts over the past five years you know I really don’t think too highly of unions. Unions today, especially the UAW, are basically in bed with major corporations, doing almost nothing for the members that pay their dues and keep them in business. Which is why I loved Elon Musk’s response when the UAW came knocking on Tesla’s door.

The Tesla CEO also lambasted the efforts of the United Auto Workers union to unionize Tesla employees at the company’s factory in Fremont, California, calling the organization’s tactics for doing so “disingenuous or outright false.” Musk alleged that the UAW’s “true allegiance is to the giant car companies, where the money they take from employees in dues is vastly more than they could ever make from Tesla.”…

Musk’s email includes a point-by-point rebuttal of a number of Moran’s claims. Regarding long hours, Musk said overtime has actually decreased by 50% in the last year, and that the average employee worked 43 hours a week. Regarding compensation, he noted that Tesla factory workers earn equity, and therefore, over a four-year period, earned “between $70,000 and $100,000 more in total compensation than the employees at other US auto companies.” On issues of safety, Musk said Tesla’s incident rate is less than half the industry average, and noted that the goal is to be “as close to zero injuries as possible.”

“There will also be little things that come along like free frozen yogurt stands scattered around the factory and my personal favorite: a Tesla electric pod car roller coaster (with an optional loop the loop route, of course!) that will allow fast and fun travel throughout our Fremont campus, dipping in and out of the factory and connecting all the parking lots,” Musk wrote. “It’s going to get crazy good.”

Don’t underestimate the power of free frozen yogurt and roller coaster rides through the factory!

Unions prey on your employees who are disgruntled. We all have them and there’s really nothing you can do about it. What you can do is continue to provide great communications to your employees about what being union-free means to them as workers, and what it doesn’t mean.

Unions lose their power the more your workers are actually educated. When they know the facts (not the alternate facts!) about what truly happens in today’s world when a union takes over a plant. This isn’t the 1940s. Most organizations today, and for sure Tesla, are competing for the best talent against their competition. This forces them to be competitive with wages, benefits and even frozen yogurt.

Where most of us fail in leadership, and this is traditionally how most organizations worked to remain union-free, was you became Fight Club! The first rule in being union-free, is to not talk about being union-free, especially with employees! This actually puts you a catch up role and you look behind the eight ball when unions come knocking.

All of sudden they have the upper hand, because you allowed them to talk about unions with your employees first, so your employees are naturally going to believe them over you. If this isn’t a big deal, why weren’t you talking to us about it?!

I think most employees today get that voting a union in your shop isn’t all rainbows and butterflies. You have to have a really bad work environment for anything to substantially change. What most workers today see when a union is voted in is the immediate payment of dues, and not much more!

The Rules for Office Romances

Posted on by
4

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. As HR pros we know what this means, which is usually a lot of unwanted advances by horny dudes who think they have a shot at the hot co-worker, who has absolutely no interest in them at all.

Welcome to the show, kids!

I’ve given out some rules in the past. Everyone on the planet has read my Rules for Hugging at the Office, but Office Romances are a little more complicated than the simple side-hug in the hallway. So, I thought I would lay out some easy to follow, simple rules for Office Romances for you to pass out to your employees on Valentine’s Day:

Rule #1 – Don’t fall for someone you supervise. If you do fall for someone you supervise, which you probably will because this is how office romances work. In that case, get ready to quit, be fired, be moved to another department, and or get the person you’re having an office romance with fired, moved, etc.

Rule #2 – Don’t fall for anyone in Payroll. When it ends, so will your paycheck. At least temporarily, and even then it will be filled with errors from now until eternity. It’s a good rule of thumb to never mess with payroll for any reason.

Rule #3 – Don’t mess around in the office, or on office grounds. Look I get it. You’re crazy in love and just can’t wait until you get home. The problem is the security footage never dies. It will live long past your tenure with us, and we’ll laugh for a long time at you. So, please don’t.

Rule #4 – Don’t send explicit emails to each other at work. It’s not that I won’t enjoy reading them, it’s that I get embarrassed when I have to read them aloud to the unemployment judge at your hearing. Okay, I lied, I actually don’t get embarrassed, but you will.

Rule #5 – Don’t pick a married one. Look I get it, you’re the work spouse. He/She tells you everything. You get so close, you really think it’s real, but it’s not. You’ll actually see this when the real spouse shows up and keys your car in the parking lot.

Rule #6 – Don’t pick someone who has crappy performance. Oh, great, you’re in love! Now I’m firing your boyfriend and you’ll have to pick between him and us, which you’ll pick him, and now I’m out two employees. Pick the great performers, it’s easier for all of us.

Rule #7 – Inform the appropriate parties as soon as possible. Okay, you went to a movie together, not a big deal. Okay, you went to the movie together and woke up in a different bed than your own. It might be time to mention this to someone in HR, if there is at anyway a conflict of some sort. If you don’t know if there’s a conflict of some sort, let someone in HR help you out with that.

Rule #8 – If it seems wrong, it probably is.  If you find yourself saying things in your head like, “I’m not sure if this is right”, you probably shouldn’t be having that relationship. If you find yourself saying things like, “If this is wrong, I don’t want to be right”, you definitely shouldn’t be having this relationship.

Rule #9 – If you find yourself hiding your relationship at work, it might be time to talk to HR. We’re all adults, we shouldn’t be hiding normal adult relationships. If you feel the need to hide it, something isn’t normal about it.

Rule #10 – Everyone already knows about your relationship. People having an office romance are the worst at hiding it. You think you’re so sneaky and clever, but we see you stopping at her desk 13,000 times a day ‘asking for help’ on your expense report. We see you. We’re adults. We know what happened when you both went into the stairwell 7 seconds apart. Stop it.

There you go. Hope that helps. Have a great Valentine’s Day!

The Super Bowl Should be on Saturday: An Employer’s Plea

Posted on by
3

So, it’s the Monday after Super Bowl and 15% of your employees didn’t show up. As HR professionals we are not shocked by this, it happens every year after the Super Bowl.

The Super Bowl has become an unofficial national holiday. You don’t even have to like the teams playing to want to go to a Super Bowl party, or throw a Super Bowl party, because it’s become a national social event.

Kraft Foods understands this and instead of trying to move the Super Bowl started an online petition to declare the Monday after the Super Bowl a national holiday, since, they claim, more than 16 million employees call in ‘sick’ the day after the Super Bowl costing organizations over $1 billion in lost productivity.

Think you have a God-given right to be off the day after the Super Bowl? Kraft Heinz agrees with you. So the food company’s giving all of its salaried employees the day off on February 6 after Super Bowl LI…

In addition to letting its employees stay home, Kraft Heinz is launching a campaign to push for everybody to be off after Super Bowls. It’s started an online petition to essentially create a new national holiday it calls “Smunday,” which extends Sunday’s Super Bowl fun into Monday.

Okay, some of this is just good old fashion marketing. Kraft Heinz food group makes a killing on Super Bowl weekend, so why not try a marketing stunt like this to drum up even more business and brand recognition!

The problem with this solution is it doesn’t really help employers gain back lost productivity and revenue, in fact, it only increases expenses by now having another paid holiday (an expense), with nothing to return the lost productivity of having your entire workforce off for a day.

The issue is that the NFL should move the Super Bowl game to Saturday evening or day. Can you imagine the nationwide party that would take place, over what it already is, if the Super Bowl was on Saturday night!

The NFL already gives both teams an extra week off to prepare. Starting the game on Saturday, instead of Sunday, wouldn’t harm the players, wouldn’t harm the NFL, and bars and restaurants would have even a bigger day than they do already.

If Kraft Heinz really wants to help America, they should change their petition to move the Super Bowl to Saturday, not just make up another work holiday.