Planning staff holidays and leave can be tricky and at the same time hectic to any organization be it a small or big business. However, employees often want to take their holidays and leave in the same week, particularly in school holidays, half-term weeks and during Christmas and New Year. Inappropriate planning of staff holidays and leave can cause the organization a great loss or decline in its business activities, therefore, in order to ensure efficient and effective management of the organization, there is a need to have appropriate management strategies to ensure that the organization has enough staff at all times to carry out its daily activities effectively. So how do you handle this?
Here are some tips to help you plan for your staff holidays and leave efficiently in order to avoid common employee holiday and leave related issues. Ensure that you have employee vacation and leave policy in your organization. Discuss your holiday and leave policy during hiring and orientation process and make available to the employees written holiday policies and procedures. Make prominent the top work periods during which holidays may be restricted or prohibited. Allow workers in similar positions or line of work to trade off holidays and leave among themselves, so long as it won’t affect production schedules or quality of work.
You can bring in reinforcements. Temporary employees come in handy when you are striving with heavy seasonal workloads which could be a breakdown for your organization if they are not carried out as they should. Therefore, you can use temporary employees to cover up during staff holidays or leave. Always plan ahead your staff holidays especially the seasonal one.
Offering premium pay, bonuses, or other employee incentives to those who agree to work during popular holidays when most of the employees’ absence could be bad for business. By achieving this, the organization will have enough employees to carry out the business activities during the holidays. This is very essential in most organizations who engage in production and sale of necessities during most festive seasons.
Make the holiday schedule known to all employees. You can put it online in a shared folder or a public calendar to make it available to all staff members. Making it accessible online is preferable to emailing to dozens of employees and it makes it easy to make updates and avoid resending multiple edited versions of the calendar. Sharing holiday information allows employees to plan around their colleagues’ schedules and avoid holiday or leave clashes.
Where you are having problems with staff not taking enough holidays and wanting to carry them over to the next year, consider setting a deadline for when your members of staff must have submitted their holiday or leave requests. So if your holiday year runs from January to December, you could have a rule that all holidays must be booked by the end of September. By doing that, you avoid the rush of taking holidays just before the year-end and won’t need to have difficult conversations about carrying holiday over.