Managing staff over the summer holidays

Managing productivity and staffing levels during the summer can be a challenge for many businesses. You may find yourself under-staffed as employees take annual leave to spend the holidays with their families, or you may find you’re rushed off your feet due to the seasonality of your business. So, how do you manage this and ensure everything continues to run smoothly over summer?

• Early planning is essential

You need to have visibility of the impact of summer on your expected output and your staffing levels. Use quieter periods to forecast and manage this ahead of time. If, for instance, you are in the tourism sector, you should have staff book their holidays as far ahead as possible and communicate a policy that not too many people should be off at one time. You can help people have visibility of this by using a shared calendar, either electronically or even on the office wall.

• Could flexible working help?

So, you’re ahead of the game and your staff have booked their summer holidays and wrote it on the calendar, but now someone comes to you and asks for a morning off for a dentist appointment. You run the risk of alienating the employee if they don’t get the time off, but there is a lot of work to do. Instead of saying no, can your business allow flexible working to this staff member? Can they work at home so they’re close to the appointment? Can they make the time up the next day? Being open to this will allow compromise and should keep your employees motivated and on side.

• Cross-training employees

To help ease staff pressures, could you train employees to handle multiple roles in the business? If you know someone is off on their travels for two weeks, could you get someone to sit with them in advance to learn how to do some of their workload, so it’s not piled up for when they get back? Not only will this help work get done and give them more skills to make them feel you’re investing in them, but it will also mean the employee coming back from their time off will not get burnt out when they return.

• Hire temporary staff

If these options above don’t work, then perhaps it’s time to put out some summer job adverts. See our article on this for more information.

• Hold catch-up meetings

It’s important that employees feel listened to, especially if you anticipate high workloads. Be transparent and promote collaborative communication between the team. You should hold regular huddles to touch base with your staff to understand struggles and concerns so that you may be able to help. Don’t forget to reward and thank good work too! I’m sure some biscuits wouldn’t go amiss after a particularly hard week.

Overall, managing productivity and staffing over the summer holidays is a challenge many businesses face and requires pro-active planning, flexibility, and effective resourcing. By using some of these ideas above, hopefully you can overcome such challenges and still make summer a productive and efficient season in your business.