The hybrid work revolution has caused a dramatic shift in how U.K. workers view Sundays, the boss of one of London’s biggest pizza chains has observed.
Thom Elliot, the cofounder of Pizza Pilgrims, has noticed an uptick in the number of diners in his restaurants on Sundays. The pizzeria boss is putting this change down to the popularization of work-from-home Mondays.
“I’m allocating this to the mindset of, ‘I don’t have to go to the office on Monday morning, so if I’m a little bit slower out of the gates, that’s probably okay,’” Elliot told the PA news agency.
Footfall at Pizza Pilgrims, which has 24 restaurants across England, most of which are in London, is a good indicator of how workers in London are shifting their lifestyles to accommodate changing work practices.
Elliot, who cofounded Pizza Pilgrims with his brother James in 2012, said this shift had also led to a rise in the number of Thursday diners at his restaurants in anticipation of a remote Friday. As a result, he says, Friday bookings have fallen.
“I think the ‘treat meal’ in the week still exists,” said Elliot.
“We’ve definitely seen a change in the makeup of that week. Thursdays are now commonly accepted as the new Fridays.”
Pizza Pilgrims enjoyed a £7.6 million increase in turnover and turned a net profit of £398,140 in 2023.
Elliot’s comments aren’t likely to go unnoticed by major employers, who have a growing suspicion that their workers aren’t raring to go from their home offices at the start and end of the week.
Bosses anxious over sluggish Mondays
As Pizza Pilgrims welcomes a new demographic of relaxed hybrid workers to its tables on a Sunday, the bosses of those workers appear increasingly nervous about their accordingly slow start out of the gate on a Monday.
Lloyd’s of London, the 336-year-old insurer, has started monitoring employees’ attendance in the office over concerns Mondays still weren’t busy enough.
Speaking in 2023, Lloyd’s of London chief executive John Neal said he wanted to get Monday office-working back to pre-pandemic levels after winning the easier midweek battle for office attendance.
“Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are busy,” Neal told the Financial Times. “We need to get Monday back.”
To do so, Neal is introducing attendance monitoring, following other major financial groups, including EY and PwC.
“We’re using it as evidential data. We know when people are here, when they’re not here. We know when people log on, when they log off. We know when people are doing emails, when they’re not doing emails,” Neal told the Telegraph.
“So we’re using the data constructively and thoughtfully. We’re not using it from a discipline point of view.”
Neal had previously said returning workers to the pre-pandemic norm was a “lost cause.” However, he noted that even before the pandemic, Lloyd’s offices were rarely full on a Friday.
A host of companies are trying to halt mass remote working on Fridays and Mondays, arguing that this combination of days away from the office is most likely to lead to falling worker productivity.
In February, Deutsche Bank banned employees from working remotely on a Friday followed by a consecutive Monday, effectively ending the “long weekend” trend that has rattled employers.
