One of the reasons why Christmas is the most stressful time of the year for many of us is that at many workplaces, there is an extremely hard-baked culture of treating it as an artificial deadline to be met at all costs, even if business outputs are not affected by delaying certain tasks until after the Christmas break. I call it the “clear the decks” culture. Unfortunately, it is so hard-wired into many office cultures that many managers are unaware of the habit. During my long working career, I saw e-mails written as early as the first week in November requiring a needlessly quick response, the specified reason being, “Christmas is approaching.” I always responded with a healthy dose of reasonable challenge.
What are the consequences of “Christmas deck-clearing?” In short, pretty horrendous for those on the receiving end. Everything, and therefore nothing, becomes urgent. Work-life balance goes out of the window. Instead of attending his/her children’s carol concert, an employee finds him/herself working until the wee small hours to complete some objectively trivial task just because his/her manager can’t bear to go on Christmas leave without a completely empty inbox. In some jobs, such as retailing, a pre-Christmas surge in workload is expected to be inevitable and must be resourced accordingly. But that is rarely the case in back-office functions.
But actually it’s worse than this. The stress caused when highest common factor prioritisation rears its head can lead to needless errors which can be costly to the employer. Even worse, preoccupation with meeting artificial deadlines can translate into a lack of concentration when at the wheel of a car. Every year I notice road accidents increase to their worst level in the entire year during December. It cannot all be down to drink-driving as it has been socially unacceptable for years and the roads are generally heavily policed at this time. Nor can it all be caused by wintry weather conditions; most Decembers of recent decades have seen mainly double-figure temperatures. So there must be another causative factor in the mix. That causative factor is, you’re guessed it, Christmas deck-clearing. In Australia, where Christmas takes place in mid-summer, this phenomenon is recognised by the traffic authorities; knowing that drivers’ attention is likely to be needlessly distracted, they hand out double demerit points (the Aussie equivalent of penalty points) for traffic offences during the period 20 December to 1 January, the most dangerous period to be on the roads, and advertise the fact by means of dot matrix boards..
If you’re a manager with responsibility for staff, take a very hard look at your team’s workload and make some tough decisions about what can be delayed until after the Christmas break, and what genuinely cannot be. Your guiding principle should be, “If in doubt, delay it.” Your desired “clear deck” could be someone else’s ruined Christmas – even ruined life. Think also of our NHS staff. Their decks will never be clear, but they will want some time off to be with their loved ones. They will have difficulty getting that if they are having to treat victims of road accidents caused by needlessly stressed-out drivers.
Have a super Christmas, don’t worry about leaving your inbox partly full and in the words of John Cooper, the grumpy police officer on the US drama SOUTHLAND, “Look sharp, act sharp, be sharp” when using the roads – in any capacity.
DAVID LAWES 
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