There’s a particular kind of euphoria that arrives in adulthood so rarely we should probably study it in laboratories. It doesn’t come from promotions or bonuses or even that first coffee of the morning.
It arrives in the form of a text message, an email, or — if you’re lucky enough to work for one of the last holdouts of analog charm — a phone hotline announcing that the office is closed due to snow.
The workplace snow day might be the only socially acceptable form of collective hooky left to us.
Environment Canada issued snowfall warnings across Ontario for tomorrow, with forecasts calling for up to 40 centimetres in some regions and temperatures plunging to -9 C. Toronto could see 20 centimetres by Thursday afternoon. Eastern Ontario and Ottawa might get 25. The Thursday morning commute, meteorologist Geoff Coulson warned, would collide blowing snow with brutal cold — a recipe for chaos that could linger into the evening rush.
For anyone who’s spent four hours crawling 30 kilometres through a whiteout to reach a cubicle they could have worked from in their basement, the math is simple: this is madness.
I once worked for a company that set up a hotline specifically for snow day announcements. You’d call a number, hear a recording, and either feel your shoulders drop in relief or your stomach tighten in dread. They weren’t precious about it, either. If the forecast looked grim, they sent people home early. No performative toughness. No speeches about grit or showing up no matter what.
Just a calm acknowledgment that sometimes the weather wins, and pretending otherwise helps no one.
It was, in hindsight, a minor act of institutional sanity. It’s also one that feels increasingly rare.
We’ve spent the better part of a decade debating remote work as though it’s some exotic perk rather than a tool in the operational toolkit. The pandemic proved most knowledge work can be done from anywhere with Wi-Fi and a laptop. Yet here we are, still treating the office as a kind of sacred ground that must be reached even when doing so requires risking life, vehicle, and sanity on ice-slicked highways.
There is some corporate theatre at play. Managers worry that letting people work from home during a storm sets a precedent — as though acknowledging that a blizzard is a legitimate reason to avoid a two-hour commute might cause the entire edifice of workplace discipline to crumble.
Employees, meanwhile, perform a grim calculus: is it worth the risk? Will I look weak if I don’t show up? What if everyone else makes it in?
The result is a kind of collective self-punishment. People white-knuckle their way through snowdrifts and black ice, arrive exhausted and rattled, and then sit at desks doing work they could have done from their kitchen tables. The commute becomes the work. Presence becomes performance.
But what’s really lost when we cling to this logic is time, obviously. Safety, certainly. But also morale. Because the gift of a snow day isn’t just the saved commute or the avoided fender-bender. It’s the reminder that your employer sees you as a human being with a life outside the office, someone whose time and safety matter more than optics.
The irony, of course, is that some of the same leaders who resist remote work during snowstorms will enthusiastically tout flexibility and work-life balance in recruitment pitches. They’ll brag about hybrid policies and employee wellness programs, then balk when someone suggests that maybe, just maybe, people shouldn’t be asked to risk their necks commuting through a blizzard to attend meetings that could have been emails.
Coulson says the forecast models show colder-than-normal conditions lasting through January and possibly into early February. In other words, there’s quite a bit of winter left to go. Which means there will be more mornings like Thursday — more warnings, more treacherous commutes, more decisions about whether to force people into the office or trust them to do their jobs from home.
The weather doesn’t care about your attendance policy. Neither does the highway traffic report or the tow truck driver pulling cars out of ditches. What matters is whether your organization can distinguish between presence and performance, between showing up and actually doing the work.
