Is your business prepared for daylight saving?

Daylight saving time ended on Sunday 27th October with the clocks turning back an hour. Whilst gaining an additional hour might sound fantastic, studies have already proven that these changes affect people, so you should take care of your business and be prepared.

Prepare For The Stress…

Yvonne Harrison from the School of Natural Sciences and Psychology researched the impact of daylight saving time on sleep and related behaviours, “the autumn transition is often popularised as a gain of one hour of sleep, but there is little evidence of extra sleep on that night.”

You shouldn’t expect that your employees will sleep longer and will have a more productive week. Most likely, it will be the other way around. The Danish Psychiatric Central Research Register checked 12 years of data in their research and found that “the transition from summer time to standard time was associated with an 11% increase in the incidence rate of unipolar depressive episodes.”

Tip: Try to be more understanding. If possible, let employees get to work on a more flexible schedule. Postpone stressful tasks to the next week or at least the second half of the week. Sometimes people start feeling strange and don’t even understand why. You should have a talk in advance and discuss that some puzzlement might happen, and that’s OK.

Prepare For The Pay…

The emotional conditions of your team are essential but don’t forget the formalities as well. If your business type requires nighttime work, keep in mind that on Sunday night, there will be an additional hour of work. As an employer, you are required to pay employees for all hours worked. When the time turns one hour back, employees will work the hour from 1:00 to 2:00 twice.

You can split the additional hour for several shifts, like hosting provider Hostinger. Hostinger operates 24/7/365 chat support and Darius Grigorjevas, the Head of their Customer Success team, says ” tells that his team splits the extra hour between the shifts. The night shift works for half an hour longer, and the morning shift comes to work half an hour earlier.

Tip: Check the overall number of work hours and find out if the additional hour fits into the workweek or is that overtime. If you want to avoid overtime for the people, you can change the start and end times of the shifts. Whatever you decide on doing, discuss this with your team. Let them know your plan and wage situation. It will eliminate misunderstandings and complaints.

Prepare For The Partners….

Don’t forget about your partners, especially if they are from different parts of the world. The tricky part with daylight saving time is that not every country does it. And even those who do, change the time on different weekends. This year, the end time in Europe is on October 27th, and in the USA, it’s on November 3rd; though even within the states some of them are exceptional: Arizona and Hawaii don’t note daylight saving time at all.

Tip: If you have scheduled conference calls with your partners, double-check their locations, time zones, and daylight-saving situation. The handy “Time and date” website has a reference table with countries and their daylight saving start and end times.

Prepare For The Sales…

One of the reasons daylight-saving time was introduced was in the hope that the extra hour of sunlight should encourage people to go outside of the home and spend more money. In an ideal world, extra spending should give a boost to small businesses and the local economy.

However the reality seems to be quite the opposite. JPMorgan Chase Institute created the Daylight savings report;In the article they note that “the switch back to standard time is associated with a drop in spending between 2.2% and 4.9%.” The drop is not significant, but you can try to prevent it.

Tip: With the Black Friday around the corner, it’s a good time to think about sales and promotions. You can start your promotions after the daylight-saving time end. People might still be a bit confused after recent changes, but a good deal has a magical power to boost the mood.

Even though people are discussing the need for daylight time saving, it’s going to happen this Sunday anyway. Time changes can affect you, your team, your partners, and your customers. But if you prepare for it in advance, you can avoid all the confusion and even get some extra sales for your business.