How to Plan Holidays to Prevent Employee Vacation Nightmares
After a long and tiring year, who doesn’t want to take time-off for vacations? However, it is not that easy and it takes a lot of effort on the part of the manager to get away from work. However, if one is the manager he must make sure that his job or hisemployee's jobs are adequately covered before either one of them leaves to avoid disrupting company’s business operations. Mentioned below are some tips that when followed will ensure adequate coverage and save the management from employees’ vacations scheduling nightmares.
1. Planning Ahead: Planning ahead when it comes to vacationing times of employees gives the management enough time to consider and go through each employee’s vacationing requests and juggle their vacationing times if they are in conflict with one another. For instance, consider a situation in which both the finance controller and the assistant finance controller have decided to take the same two weeks off. Now if the management knew about their vacation plans beforehand then it can request one of the employees to find an alternate date for time off as rejecting one of their requests outright would have been bad for employee’s morale.
2. Team meetings: The management can also schedule team meeting to address the issue of scheduling time-off by asking each member of their staff to tell them about their preferred vacationing time and then log these in the system or an online vacationing calendar so that if too many employees want time off on same dates then rescheduling can easily be done to avoid the whole win or lose situation.
3. Keep others in the loop: Staff should be reminded to change their voice mail greetings as well as out of office email auto-replies as the time of their vacation draws near. Not only this but it should be mandatory for the staff to provide the dates by which they are coming back to work, who is substituting for them or who they have delegated their work to and their emergency contact details. Making the staff do so is very important for the company, the employee himself as well as the customers so that the business doesn’t suffer and there are no unexpected surprises.
4. Vacation Schedule: The vacation schedule should not be treated as a hidden document but it should be made available to everyone through a shared folder as it will allow the employees to see who is vacationing when and to plan around their colleagues’ vacation schedules. This is very important because then some old staff would be there in the holidays to manage the business rather than blindly letting new hires running the business.
5. Follow-up: It is the job of the manager to check which employee has a vacation overdue and to make sure that the employees are taking their annual time-off rather than stock piling it and carrying it forward to next year and then taking a 3 to 4 month or even 6 months vacations all in one go because if such a situation arises then the management would be in a lot of trouble. In such a situation, the management of the company or the employer has the right to tell the employee to utilize their vacationing days before the time runs out or they end up getting carried over to next year.
6. Say No: There are times during the year when a company cannot afford to let its employees take time off for a well-deserved vacation as those days might be the days when sales sky rocket. In such situations, the manager has the right to say no and refuse any or all vacationing request made by his or her staff.
