Its summertime and your hard working employees are excited to plan their well-deserved vacations. As an employer, you want to encourage time off among your staff, since it’s been proven that vacations improve motivation, productivity and mental health. And nowadays, work-life balance is an aspect many job seekers (especially millennials) look for when choosing where they work. With more and more employers offering going to great lengths to encourage work-life balance, you are bound to lose employees if you don’t do the same.
But work still has to get done, and scheduling employee vacations can be a challenge for managers. You need to make sure that there aren’t too many people taking vacation at the same time, and that you have adequate coverage for those that are going on vacation. All the while, you must make sure you are being fair and every employee has the same opportunity to enjoy time off. Here are some tips for fair vacation scheduling:
1) Create clear policies for scheduling employee vacations
If you set guidelines and limits ahead of time that your staff must follow when scheduling vacations, you are less likely to have resentful employees down the line. If there are certain times that business is simply too busy for anyone to take time off, make it known. To ensure fair vacation scheduling, set a limit to the number of people that can take a particular day off. In the case that too many people want to take vacation on the same day or week, have a protocol for how you will choose which employees can have that time off. This can be on a first come, first serve basis or based on how long employees have been with the company.
2) Ask for a certain amount of notice when scheduling employee vacations
When scheduling employee vacations, your business is less likely to suffer if you have adequate time to prepare for their absence. Make it clear to employees that they must give a certain amount of notice before they go on vacation. This will help both you and the employee, since you will both have time to arrange coverage and ensure any important assignments that need to be completed are done before the employee leaves for vacation. To motivate employees to give you as much notice as possible, make it known that the farther ahead they schedule, the less likely they are to have conflicts with another employee’s vacation.
3) Consider shutting down your business for a week or two
If you really want to bypass any issues around fair vacation scheduling, consider shutting down your business for a one or two-week period during the summer. That way, you see to it everyone takes their time off, and you don’t have to worry about scheduling employee vacations at different times. This may not be an option for all businesses, but it’ worth exploring. If you are worried about your customers having nowhere to go, consider referring them to a competitor during that period of time. For more information about shutting down your business, check out the article 7 Reasons the Smartest Companies Shut Down During Christmas Week from Inc.com.
4) Allow employees to trade their work
If staff members can easily step into each other’s jobs while they take time off, this could make scheduling employee vacations much less of a headache for you. This is common with jobs such as restaurant servers, where employees can trade shifts to accommodate their vacations. If it’s a job such as data entry, if the employee works in a department with others that do similar tasks they can split up their assignments among their co-workers during the time they will be gone.
5) Set an example
Fair vacation scheduling applies to managers, too. No matter how accommodating you try to be to your employees, if you aren’t taking your own vacation time, they won’t feel encouraged about their own. By remembering to schedule your own vacation, you will make yourself and your employees happier, more productive and more motivated.
Author: Jessica Cody
Jessica Cody, a native of Fairfield County, Connecticut, has a background in online marketing and public relations. Currently, she works at VHMNetwork LLC in the role of Marketing Analyst. She is a graduate of the University of Connecticut, where she studied Journalism and Political Science. She is also an avid runner with a passion for the outdoors.
