The weekend tends to go by really fast and before you know it, it’s already Monday.
Getting back to the 9 to 5 grind after a well-earned weekend is a challenge to many working adults.
Commonly classified as ‘Monday Blues’, the sensation of dread that overcomes individuals at the start of each week can have dire consequences.
According to research conducted by Gallup, the low morale of heading into a new work week booty perfect can affect an employee’s engagement and performance, ultimately resulting in affecting their well-being as well.
What may seem like a harmless Monday Blues can thus impact the overall performance of your workplace. Hence, it is critical to figure out what can be done in here order to make employees look forward to Mondays.
Get rid of the Monday blues with these 5 tips
1. Re-align your purpose
The new generation of employees in the workforce highlight purpose as the key incentive when it comes to accepting a job offer.
A good workplace performance doesn’t just boil down to numbers and KPIs. By reminding yourself of the bigger picture and your initial purpose of starting your job, you’ll re-discover the motivation you originally had.
Channel that initial motivation and re-align your purpose to start the week on a right note.
2. Engage with your employees
Make your employees look forward to Mondays by having something they can look forward to.
By conducting simple employee engagement activities such as weekly Monday breakfast or lunch.
You can even designate Monday as a special day for instance “Health Mondays” where you provide fruits and healthy snacks at the start of the week.
Whichever way you decide to conduct your employee engagement, be sure to make it an exciting incentive for your team to look forward to.
3. Keep your meetings short
It may take a while for one to acclimatize to work after the weekend. Warming up to the routine of a work week can affect an employee’s focus, resulting in a shorter attention span.
There will also be employees who are rearing to get back to work to complete tasks from the previous week.
When your team’s full attention is limited, it’s best to keep meetings concise. Achieve short meetings by highlighting key discussion areas and deliverables for the week.
If your office has a set agenda, its best to time your meetings to see if the agenda is optimised to fit a short meeting time.
4. View Mondays as improvement days
Mondays are a clean slate for employees to press the reset button. While it may not be the most favourable work day, Mondays are the opportunity to start over.
If you had a challenging task from the previous week, Mondays are perfect to go over the next steps in overcoming them and improving them.
You can also document your “room for improvement” to see if the next steps implemented worked and vice versa and implement what worked the next time you’re assigned a similar task.
While the idiom “if it’s not broken don’t fix it” applies heavily in our workplace, Mondays are an opportunity to experiment and challenge yourself on how you can do things differently.
5. Treat Monday like a Friday
The day we most look forward to, Friday, is favoured for many reasons. It’s the last working day of the week which allows us to shift our focus away from work, to other things that help us relax like spending time with family or friends and indulging in our hobbies.
It’s common for us to designate Fridays as days where we schedule our leisure activities as the luxury of time during the weekends lets us rest and recover from them.
Duplicating the same activities on a Monday programs you to get excited over the first day of the week similarly to how one would look forward to a Friday.
If recovering from fatigue from your newly scheduled Monday activity is a concern for you, try to find ways to limit the tiring elements from your activity. It could be in the form of cutting down the duration or starting relatively earlier.
The inevitability of heading back work after a weekend’s worth of relaxation can be a major source of dread to many of us.
Through re-framing the infamous “Monday Blues” it can spark a changed mindset in how we start viewing the start of the week in a new light for us to finally look forward to it.
