Today is officially Boss’s Day, and workplaces all over the country are celebrating it—but they shouldn’t. In fact, they should pretend it doesn’t exist.
If you’re lucky enough to never have encountered Boss’s Day, it’s exactly what it sounds like: a holiday where employees are expected to express gratitude for their managers and employers. It’s not ubiquitous, but it’s very much a thing in some offices—kind of like Administrative Professionals Day or any other day where a specialized profession is celebrated. The only difference is that this one is patently ridiculous, if not outright offensive.
It’s not that being a manager isn’t important, skilled work worth celebrating. It is! But being in charge already comes with plentiful rewards, many of them monetary. Most importantly, it comes with power dynamics that make it wildly inappropriate to pressure workers to celebrate their bosses. Employees should never feel pressure to spend their own money to pay for a gift to the person who determines if they get a paycheck or not, and yet, on Boss’s Day, that’s exactly what often happens.
Here are some accounts workers have sent me over the years about how their offices handle this highly suspect “holiday”:
Apparently October 16th is “Boss’s Day.” A person in my department at work has sent out an email asking for $5 from each of us to buy our manager a gift. While $5 isn’t going to break the bank, there are over 20 employees on my team, equaling $100 for a gift. The team manager in question is new. They have only been here a month and haven’t had an opportunity to be a “good” boss to us yet. I am also not particularly fond of them in general. One-hundred dollars seems like an outrageous amount of money for someone who we don’t know very well and who already makes exponentially more than any of us on the team.
Our Boss’s Day breakfast is handled in the most cringeworthy of ways: The staff set everything up in a conference room and then the bosses go in and get their food. After they finish, another cringe-worthy email goes out to the staff telling them they can come in and eat the leftovers. (I say “them” here, because I have never eaten, even when I brought something. The whole thing is just a big appetite suppressant.)
I worked in a department where the department head was both feared and despised by the entire team under her. Yet strangely on “Boss’s Day,” people still felt gingerly obligated to give her chocolates, cards, and stuffed animals as a showing of gratitude. She later sent out an email picture proudly displaying all of her trinkets and saying how “proud” she was. Ugh.
The staff where I work have received the usual cringeworthy email from the office manager, notifying us we are to provide a breakfast potluck plus afternoon desserts for our bosses. There is a sign-up sheet, no doubt for convenient tracking of who participates. The office manager kindly suggested that “store-bought treats” would be acceptable, although the expectation is clearly homemade. The office manager complimented us on a great job last year and notes they hope to see “full participation” again this year.
Because of the power dynamics involved, a lot of workers don’t feel comfortable opting out:
My team celebrates Boss’s Day every year with a gift card for our boss. It would appear obvious (and almost hostile, which I don’t intend) if I were the only one of the five people to abstain from contributing. And if I were to suggest we stop the practice altogether, it would really ruffle some feathers, since I’m the newest hire and this has been going on for several years. Both years, I’ve been asked to contribute $25 to the gift card (which means my boss is getting a $125 gift card from us annually). That amount isn’t uncomfortable for me or for anyone else on my team—we’re in a well-paid field. It’s more the principle of the thing that drives me crazy. But I don’t feel like I have enough standing to speak up among my teammates, and I don’t want to appear like I’m the only one on the team who “doesn’t appreciate” our manager (even though I totally do!). So I guess I’m coughing up another $25.
To be fair, these “voluntary but not really” collections for the boss aren’t always driven by bosses themselves. Sometimes it’s a lower-level employee who pressures everyone else to participate:
I think our celebration is really driven by the office manager. Most of the bosses are decent enough people and they probably never even see the office manager’s icky “full participation” email. They just see the generous morning and afternoon spreads and think how great they must be to deserve such largesse.
In fact, some managers are horrified when they learn what’s going on:
When I was right out of college and flat broke, eating on $40 a week, I was working in a call center and was constantly being hit up for $5 here for a baby shower, $5 there for a co-worker’s birthday, and then finally, $10 for Boss’s Day. I wound up breaking down into tears in my boss’s cube, telling her I was going broke with all of these gift giving occasions that were being presented to me as mandatory by my co-workers. She was horrified, and the incessant email bombardments finally came to an end.
But even managers who know what’s going on and feel uncomfortable with it don’t always know how they can stop it:
I hate Boss’s Day. As a boss with a loyal, amazing team, I cannot win. I hate receiving gifts from below because it makes me uncomfortable and feels unjust since I make more than them. By the same token, I can’t say, “Don’t get me anything for Boss’s Day!” because it makes it seem like I’m expecting something when it’s possible I wouldn’t have gotten anything and it could have been a normal day. I wish my whole organization would have a note go out from the CEO with a “gifts cannot flow up, no matter what the holiday/reason, please consider a card or personal note if you want to show appreciation from someone more senior than you,” but too many other managers/directors/VPs just love getting things from the people they manage.
For the record, managers: You can put a stop to this! It’s not presumptuous to preemptively tell your team, “I see on the calendar that Boss’s Day is coming up. In case anyone worries they’re supposed to plan something for me, please do not! I should be celebrating you, not the other way around.”
Or there’s always the way this (excellent-sounding) manager handles it:
We celebrate Boss’s Day in my office by the bosses thanking us for being such awesome employees and making their jobs easier, and as a reward they buy us pizza for lunch. I’m totally down with celebrating if that’s how we do it.
Hear that, bosses? Lunch is on you today.
