Who wants to go back to work after a couple of weeks of relaxation, or not in some cases, with family and friends during Christmas and New Year?  Well apparently not many people do want to go back to work and the news is not good at all for small businesses according to the Federation of Small Businesses.

Dubbed as “stay-at-home Friday”, today will see a great amount of employees calling in sick or simply not turning up in an attempt to extend their first 2009 weekend.

The Federation of Small Businesses has claimed that the lack of employees today however will cost small businesses £250 million and it would be as if there had been an extra weekend placed into the year.

The biggest trigger for the issue is the fact that January 2 is a bank holiday in Scotland, and employees in England, Northern Ireland and Scotland may feel as though they should be entitled to one as well.  However, these actions will provide more trouble for their employers than they can possible know.

A spokesman for the Federation, Stephen Alambritis, claims, “There is that resentment, plus the fact that it is a Friday, it is close to the weekend.  People might think that because there is a recession there is not much to do anyway, with orders down.  It can be a dismissible offence not to turn up for work without good cause, it could be that employers will just pass this one off, given that there is a recession they have got more important things on their minds.

“But customer service will be down, it will put employers in a bad light if they don’t take it up and it will kick off the year in a bad way,” claimed Alambritis.

The current temperature doesn’t help as the country is currently feeling the chill of below 0 in many places.  Also the current economic crisis is another strong reason why tens of thousands of employees just won’t think it is worth turning up to work today.

Alambritis continued to say, “In normal years, many firms offer their staff a long break over Christmas to reward or rejuvenate them. This year many have done it simply to save cash.  But for those that do want to open for business on January 2, many are going to be hit by “no-show Friday”.  Struggling businesses can only hope their staff really are geared up to go back to work on Monday, which will be the real start of the year for many.”

In recent years there has been more of a relaxed feeling towards other such “duvet days” which see employees calling in from home stating that they don’t want to come it, however, when the whole country makes the decision not to attend the office, the knock on effect is clearly damaging especially in such a touchy economic climate.

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