Strategic Workforce Planning Shields Employers From Super Bowl Monday Absences

Super Bowl Monday has become a built-in stress test for workforce planning. Each year, a predictable spike in PTO and call-outs sends companies scrambling, exposing the gap between known human behavior and actual preparedness. In 2026, nearly 1 in 100 U.S. employees requested PTO for the day, according to BambooHR, with many more absences surfacing at the last minute. The pattern repeats annually, raising a sharper question about how intentionally organizations plan for events they can see coming months in advance.

For an expert perspective, we turned to Chris Helvajian, Sr. Recruiter at Included Health. Helvajian brings over 15 years of experience in talent acquisition, with a track record of building recruiting strategies in fast-scaling environments, including roles at BetterUp and within mission-driven healthcare organizations where workforce continuity is critical. Through his work supporting member-facing teams, he has seen firsthand how predictable cultural moments like Super Bowl Monday can reveal deeper truths about workforce planning maturity and organizational intentionality.

“If an organization can’t plan for predictable events year over year, that tells me they’re operating reactively. Super Bowl Monday isn’t the problem here, it’s a reflection of how intentional your workforce planning really is,” says Helvajian. While some may see the Super Bowl Monday effect as a one-off challenge, major events like The Winter Olympics, NCAA March Madness Tournament, The FIFA World Cup, and even Taylor Swift album drops create opportunities for coverage challenges in businesses.

The issue isn’t confined to sporting or cultural events, either. Helvajian points out that the same pattern surfaces during routine business activities, like an all-company offsite. In either case, the result is the same: a gap in planning creates coverage issues for external customers or internal bottlenecks when key decision-makers are absent. It’s a recurring pattern that, in the case of Super Bowl Monday, costs businesses upwards of five billion dollars in lost productivity.

• From reaction to recognition: Helvajian advises that leaders must move beyond treating Super Bowl Monday as an operational inconvenience and instead acknowledge it as a predictable moment of human behavior. Rather than scrambling to fill gaps after the fact, he emphasizes the importance of anticipating employee sentiment and planning accordingly. Leaders, he says, should “get ahead of those kinds of events and recognize their importance,” particularly when cultural stakes are local and deeply felt. “Especially if it’s the Super Bowl in Seattle, and you’re a big employer in the city and your team just won,” he explains, “Just anticipate that workforce disruptions are likely to happen.”

• Time is everything: A mature planning model replaces week-to-week scheduling with quarterly discipline. Leaders map major commitments in advance, set clear blackout windows for critical functions, and build flexibility into quieter periods so trust is earned, not improvised. “Time is what allows people and organizations to be more strategic,” Helvajian says, adding, “There’s a much greater degree of flexibility that employers should give when the context calls for it, and that kind of maturity isn’t dependent on the size of the organization.”

Of course, such an approach often runs into a common executive concern: the “slippery slope” argument that giving an inch on flexibility will lead to employees taking a mile. BambooHR data shows that ahead of a recent Super Bowl, only 1% of employees scheduled PTO in advance, compared to an average of 2.3% who ultimately took the day off. The data suggests the primary issue is not an abuse of trust, but a systemic gap in planning for a highly predictable event.

• The trust equation: For Helvajian, the real issue is not PTO volume, it’s organizational posture. Companies that default to suspicion often create the very disengagement they fear, while those that lead with trust tend to see employees rise to the expectation. “You want your employees to act like professionals, so you should treat them with respect and trust that they will act that way if you give them the opportunity,” he says. And accountability, he adds, should be evidence-based, not hypothetical, sharing, “If they’re not, then you should have data showing that they’re not.”

• The trust dividend: The result of such strategic planning is a key employee benefit, and something teams can use as both a recruitment and retention benefit. Helvajian elaborates “A really mature organization has a flexible or fluid time off policy outside of hectic times or surge times. You don’t need to worry about last-minute things that come up in your personal life, because you have a flexible time off policy to cover it.” In his view, flexibility is not a perk layered on top of operations, it is a byproduct of thoughtful planning that strengthens culture and continuity at the same time.

Ultimately, how an organization handles a predictable event like Super Bowl Monday can be a proxy for its readiness for true volatility. A gap in planning for the foreseeable raises questions about a company’s ability to handle major disruptions like the economic and technological changes. “If you can’t react and plan for those very predictable events like a Super Bowl or a large industry conference that comes up year after year, you’re probably not operating at a really thoughtful, intentional level,” which creates a “chaotic environment that leads to regrettable attrition or losing out as a business.”

His most practical solution, however, reflects a sentiment shared by millions of workers: move the Super Bowl to Saturday or formalize Monday as a holiday. Ironically, next year’s Super Bowl coincides with Valentine’s Day and Presidents’ Day weekend, creating an extended holiday window that may amplify, rather than alleviate, workforce planning complexity for employers already struggling to get ahead of the predictable.