If Sunday nights are awash with anxiety and Mondays feel like a matter of survival, chances are you’re already familiar with ‘Bare Minimum Monday’: the idea that employees take it super easy on the first day of the working week.
The term was coined by a TikTok creator Marisa Jo who claims that BMM is the optimum time to do low key admin and prep jobs, which will smoothly pave the way productivity later on in the week. The concept is linked to the so-called Sunday Scaries — anxiety, basically — which regularly affect more than two-thirds of Britons, who cite lack of sleep and the anticipation of a heavy workload as the reason for their end of weekend angst.
As such, Bare Minimum Monday has its roots in ‘self-care’ — which if you were being cynical might increasingly seem synonymous with ‘doing whatever one wants’, not least because it comes hot on the heels of a slew of work place trends including career cushioning and quiet quitting.
However, many people would argue that BMM has been going on for years — just without a buzzy moniker to make it an easily sharable social media trend. Who hasn’t had a hectic, heavy weekend and found themselves sitting at their desk on a Monday morning thinking, ‘I just need to survive the next eight hours’ and quietly accepting this is not going to be the most dynamic day of their career?
However the difference with that and BMM is that BMM is regular and planned. And the trouble with that is that many of us don’t know what our working day looks like until we fire up our computers at 9am.
It’s all well and good thinking ‘I’m just going to do some light filing and tidy my desk’ but what happens if the project you are working on hits an unexpected but enormous obstacle? What if your colleague is off sick and you need to cover their responsibilities? What if one of your clients calls an emergency meeting? You’d be hard pushed to think of an industry where “can this wait until tomorrow? It’s just I’m currently practising Bare Minimum Monday” will wash.
This is not to diminish the very real threat of burnout and the negative health implications of work-related stress on the UK workforce, especially now we’re in the grip of a brutal cost of living crisis. We live in a world that has long glorified the grind, leading us to believing burnout and stress are normal parts of work. And too many of us learnt the hard way that no one cares or even notices if you work into the small hours.
Putting work above mental health is never advisable but, as with most things in life, a happy medium should be established. And ‘self-care’ should never be co-opted as a way for people to avoid difficult tasks or conversations.
“Flexible and reduced or compressed hours working should never be a taboo subject between employer and employee,” says Ben Keighley, founder of social media recruitment specialist Socially Recruited. “However it is critical that there is sign off from both and an alignment of goals. Bare Minimum Monday instead feels like a trend being followed in secret and symptomatic of poor workplace communication.”
Kate Palmer, HR Advice and Consultancy Director at Peninsula, a HR, employment law and consultancy firm for employers, believes that the concept of BMM should ring alarm bells for employers. “Any time an employee is not putting in full effort or fulfilling all of their expected duties on the assigned days, it is a concern for their employer,” she says. “It’s important to find out the reason for the change in attitude. If an employee is genuinely struggling with mental health, then adjustments can be put in place to help them. This could include change in hours or responsibilities.”
However, she is clear that “overdoing things” on the weekend is not an acceptable reason to embrace BMM. “It’s reasonable for employers to expect full focus and productivity from employees while they are on the clock,” she says, warning that “if an employee continues to do the bare minimum, then it could be cause for disciplinary action to be taken”.
However, Professor Craig Jackson, Occupational health Psychologist at Birmingham City University, supports BMM. “Bare minimum Monday is not slacking — it is the choice to pace [workers] and spread-out workload evenly over the week,” he says. “Think of it like the hare and the tortoise. Workers who are fresh, relaxed, happy and not fatigued or over-worked are very good for business — they are safer, more likely to comply with rules and take fewer ‘short-cuts’ in what they do.”
Far from BMM being a threat to productivity, Professor Jackson believes BMM is in fact “very good for business”.
“What is bad for business is having an epidemic of accidents and near-misses due to tired or over-stretched workers this will ultimately cost businesses and companies much more than smaller but crucial investment of allowing workers to set their own pace of output,” he says. “Satisfied workers with the dignity to control their own pace of work are extremely good for business.”
Emily Austen, founder of London PR Agency EMERGE, which has 22 employees, allows the team to finish early on Fridays, as well as paying for fertility tests and up to three therapy sessions per month believes BMM is “bad for business”.
“Since when has ’bare minimum’ been an aspirational description of anything?” she asks. “It carries a terribly negative connotation along with it, and also creates a newer version of the four-day week. Employers usually know what’s best for their business, and this constant need for a hybrid situation that puts the business last, won’t work long term. While businesses should take seriously their duty of care for their employees, the narrative that doing less is compatible with ambitious businesses is challenging.”
It carries a terribly negative connotation along with it, and also creates a newer version of the four-day week
Maybe those of us who feel we regularly need a BMM should be assessing one or all of the following: time management, partying habits, workplace culture, overall workload, job satisfaction, relationship with our boss and attitude to career progression.
Spending every Sunday dreading Monday, and every Monday taking it easy is not tenable or healthy. Surely we – employees and employers alike – need to be looking at why so many of us apparently dread the start of each working week to the point that we just silently opt out.
BMM should not mean slacking, survival or self-care: surely we need to get to a place where it doesn’t exist at all.
