Trust and the Sunday Scaries

As anyone who has ever heard me speak or has read my work knows, the foundation for all my work is this: The #1 reason people stay or leave…and whether they are engaged or disengaged…is how much they trust their boss. Employees value trust because too many have worked without it and trust has a high percentage of Americans sleepless before starting their work week.

Avoiding the “Sunday Scaries”

It’s Sunday evening in the Finnegan house. Should we take a walk in the stifling Florida heat? Or bail out and watch a movie? Maybe barbecue something if we have the energy for it?

But then like taking on a shadow, we realize that the weekend is almost over. And Monday morning is just a few hours away.

For most of us, Sunday night doesn’t feel like Saturday night. Or even like Tuesday night. It has an identity of its own and that identity, believe it or not, has a name. Sunday Scaries.

And there is data to back it up. LinkedIn found 80% of working Americans worry about the upcoming week on Sundays,[i] while another study determined the average time of arrival for “Sunday Scaries” is during that afternoon at 3:58 PM.[ii] No kidding. That’s major-league precise.

I find myself punching back, saying I should live in the present, that I deserve every hour of my weekend. But by then I’m already three toes into work because I’ve begun talking to myself about my “scaries”.

Studies also tell us that we tend to stay up later on Sunday nights than we should, likely to gain more of that “owed” time, and to somehow delay the inevitable.[iii] Those of you who work non-traditional schedules probably experience these same feelings, just on other days and times.

I recently told these findings to a client company executive who said Sunday night is the only night he takes a sleeping pill. He nodded his head at these findings with no surprise at all.

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Further Reading: The Crucial Time of Day for Stay/Leave Decisions

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The Suggested Fixes

Here’s just one list to at least partially solve the “scaries:[iv]

• Unplug from your phone or social media.
• Try a mediation or relaxation app.
• Maintain a good work-life balance.
• Do some exercise.
• Get some fresh air.
• Schedule fun activities for Sunday afternoon and evening.
• Split up errands throughout the week so you don’t feel like you wasted your entire Sunday doing them.
• Have one glass of wine, not two.
• Or worst case, talk with a therapist.

I like the list, every part of it. But to lean on John Lennon by allowing ourselves to imagine, let’s examine what would be the very best part of a perfect job for us to go to on Monday mornings.

Back to Picking a Fight with Buffett and Hertzberg

The best part of a perfect job would be that we feel a strong sense of mutual trust with everyone we work with, especially our manager. We trust our manager to be both open and supportive, we trust our colleagues to share what they know and confess what they don’t, we trust our customers to be direct and open about what they like about our product and what they wish was better. And we trust our employees to show up every day, on time, and to do their best.

No job is perfect, but we should all treasure our jobs if most of the above is true and especially the manager part…and abandon our jobs if most of this isn’t happening. Life is too short to stay in a bad job. And as executives it’s our job to MAKE our teams’ jobs to reflect this high-trust environment.

Warren Buffett is known to have said, “Trust is like the air we breathe – when it’s present nobody really notices; when it’s absent everybody notices,”^[v] …and by saying so Buffett echoed the historic work of Fredrick Herzberg. It was Herzberg back in 1959 who declared the difference between actions that motivate like recognition versus those that we quietly take for granted until they disappear, like trust.^[vi]

Buffett and Herzberg are both on my hero list, yet I’d look forward to debating either of them on whether employees take a trust-building supervisor for granted as each of them imply. And the reason why today’s employees so value a trusted supervisor is because most of us have lived on the other, darker side with a jerk boss who had little interest in or how-to knowledge to ever build trust. These are the supervisors who keep to themselves, grumble about their co-workers above and below them, and who make no efforts to learn about their employees or share information about themselves. And the worst of them blame their turnover on pay and HR, understate their own impact, and mislead in other ways…directing their teams by their own behaviors to skimp on their work and to ultimately quit.

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Further Reading: Who Talks About Their Boss Over Dinner? Everyone!

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Our Job is to Cut Turnover

We pride ourselves in helping client companies reduce employee turnover by 30% and more, consistently. But there are times when companies deserve to lose a few really good employees, especially if they assign those employees to lousy bosses. We also know the best way to lose good workers is to retain workers who deserve to terminated. So to build a high-retention organization, neither poor-performing leaders nor poor-performing employees can be tolerated.

A few weeks ago I mentioned “psychological safety” as a relatively new term that describes something important.

McKinsey’s research defines psychological safety as feeling safe to take interpersonal risks, to speak up, to disagree openly, to surface concerns without fear of negative repercussions or pressure to sugarcoat bad news. They go on to say that psychological safety is both a driver of worker productivity and also that we have too little of it. McKinsey’s studies make clear that a psychological-safe environment improves retention, engagement, and more.^[iv]

My educated guess is that employees who work in psychologically safe climates come to work with a smile on Monday mornings, having gotten to bed on time and feel fully refreshed from their weekends. We all deserve that, too.

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Further Reading: On Burnout, Barry, Stay Interviews, and “Psychological Safety”

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Understand the data impacting workforce numbers and get in front of the looming retention and recruiting crisis. 

Dick Finnegan’s new book, Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis, publishes this September. Pre-order your copy now to get ahead of the looming workforce retention challenge. Want to purchase 25 copies or more for your team? Visit the bookpal bulk order page for a significant discount – 38% and more!

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[i] https://www.linkedin.com/blog/member/career/your-guide-to-winning-work-decoding-the-sunday-scaries

[ii] https://swns-research.medium.com/study-majority-of-americans-come-down-with-a-case-of-the-sunday-scaries-every-week-2ce405acb626

[iii] https://swns-research.medium.com/study-majority-of-americans-come-down-with-a-case-of-the-sunday-scaries-every-week-2ce405acb626

[iv] https://time.com/7275089/what-are-sunday-scaries/

[v] Paul Fiorelli, “Integrity Builds Trust: What? So What? and Now What?” Institute of Business Ethics, February 23, 2023; https://www.ibe.org.uk/resource/integrity-builds-trust-what-so-what-and-now-what-blog.html

[vi] Charlotte Nickerson, “Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory Of Motivation-Hygiene,” Simply Psychology, September 28, 2023; https://www.simplypsychology.org/herzbergs-two-factor-theory.html