US Labor Day: Google allows employees 4-day extended weekend to avoid burnout

Google gave its employees an additional one-time paid leave for "collective wellbeing" over the US Labor day weekend, CNBC reported. Now along with Saturday, Sunday on September 5-6, and an off on Labor Day on September 7, full-time employees and interns were encouraged to take the Friday before Labor Day off as well, making it a four-day long weekend. This comes at the back of comapnies extending work-from-home norms amid rising cases of coronavirus across the world.

"We strongly encourage you to take this day off — and managers should actively support their team to reprioritize work commitments in order to do so," a document with the internal forum for Google employees said.

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This additional holiday is for full-time employees and interns only, and will not be applicable to temporary workers, vendours or contractors, the report said.

However, some of Goggle’s support teams will not be able to take the day off as the company needs some employees on shift to be able to tend to the customer’s needs. CNBC reported that “something similar” to this is being looked into for those groups of employees.

Since this is a Covid-19 pandemic related holiday, Google won’t be adding this to the annual calendar. "This extra holiday is specific to 2020 to support Googlers' wellbeing in light of Covid-19," the company said. "Please take the time to do whatever you need for yourselves."

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According to the report, Google also stressed that this leave cannot be swapped with any other day. "We'd like you to take this time off together as one team to better allow for detachment as a global community."

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This move was put to effect as the company’s executives are looking for ways to support their employees who are scheduled to continue working from home at least until mid-2021. Recently, Google’s Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai had asked employees to take the day off on May 22 in view of employee burnout.