Managing staff summer holidays
If you’re an SME or Micro-Business, the next few months can prove a real headache as a large proportion of your staff want to jet off for a well-earned summer holiday. This problem is of course compounded if the majority of your employees are parents, as they will all be needing to go away within the same 6 week period to avoid a hefty fine for school absence!
Factors to consider
The most obvious consideration is ensuring that you are not understaffed by letting everyone go off on holiday at once. You should also be careful that anyone who hasn’t chosen to take their leave during this main holiday period is not left feeling that they’re being massively overworked at the expense of everyone else’s fun.
That said, you should also bear in mind that sending individuals off one by one during the summer period can slow productivity. Those left behind may decide to wait until one person is back to progress an issue, and by that stage someone else who is needed for the next part of the process has gone on their holiday, causing further delay.
Some companies adopt a partial ‘factory shut-down’ concept, where entire teams go off for the same two week period. It is accepted by everyone else that that team won’t be in action during that time. However, this only works if all your employees in that team are happy to take the same two weeks, and if your business can still function on a temporary basis without that team.
Remember too that it’s not just parents that need time off in the summer. Most of your childless employees will be all too happy to take their holiday during term time when it’s several thousand pounds cheaper, but not if their partner is a teacher, or if they have nephews and nieces that they want to join on a family holiday.
Creating a Holiday Policy
If you haven’t already got one, a holiday policy is a great mechanism for ensuring that you don’t get stuck with an understaffing problem at the last minute.
Your policy should be distributed to all staff and should include:
• The fact that holiday needs to be requested and that your preferred dates are not guaranteed.
• How much notice is needed for your holiday request
• The mechanism for requesting holiday e.g. submitting a form to a line manager
• Clear parameters for how holiday requests are considered e.g. on a first come first served basis
• Any dates that holidays cannot be taken
• The maximum number of days staff can take off consecutively (the standard for most organisations being 2 weeks unless in exceptional circumstances)
• When the holiday year starts and ends, so that staff know when they need to have used their allowance by (the most common are Jan-Dec, or April-March).
Keeping Track of Holidays
Somewhere you will need to keep a master list of when everyone is on their holidays. This will help you to consider additional holiday requests in the light of how many staff are already off during that time period. There are many software tools that can do this for you, or you can do it the old-fashioned way with a spreadsheet, or the stone-age way with a calendar and a pen!
Don’t forget to request your own holidays
It’s important to set an example to staff by requesting your own holiday in advance, so that they can see that everyone is using the same system. This also means that you won’t be stuck wanting to go away, but finding that there is no-one senior enough around to run things while you’re gone.
All workers are entitled to paid annual leave. It’s important to make sure that your staff use this entitlement for their own physical and mental health benefits, as well as for the productivity of your business; happy employees are helpful employees! However, the scheduling of holidays does need careful management, to ensure both that your employees feel that they have been treated fairly, and that they have a company to come back to!