With summer around the corner, more of your employees might be off on holiday than usual.
If you’re only a team of ten, two people off at the same time is 20% of your workforce. That can really hit hard if you haven’t planned properly for it.
What does planning properly look like?
Let’s take a look.
Map your dependencies before anyone goes anywhere
Before the holidays kick in, work out who owns what and what happens when they’re gone. For each person, ask:
- What can’t wait while they’re away?
- What can be paused or simplified for a couple of weeks?
- Who else could cover the essentials if they had to?
If nobody else can cover something critical, that’s worth fixing now.
It doesn’t have to be complicated. A handover doc, a short walkthrough, a shared folder with the key information.
If the gap is too big to cover internally, temporary support is worth looking at.
Protect the people who stay
This can be easy to miss and it’s often where the September resignation risk comes from.
When the team is short, the people who are in will usually just get on with it.
But getting on with it while covering for two colleagues for three weeks is a lot to ask without acknowledging it.
A few things that actually help:
- Tell people directly that you know it’s busier and you appreciate it. It takes two minutes and it matters.
- Decide up front what can slip rather than letting everything get stretched at once.
- Cut meetings and non-essential tasks during peak holiday periods. If it can wait until everyone’s back, let it.
- Check in during the period, not just at the end of it.
Get ahead of client expectations
If your capacity is going to be reduced, let clients know before a deadline gets missed.
Most people are fine with it when you tell them in advance. They’re a lot less fine when they find out after the fact.
Use it as a stress test
If one person being off causes real disruption, pay attention to that.
It tells you where your single points of failure are, which processes only work because one person runs them and where knowledge needs to be shared more widely.
Use this information for how you structure the team going forward.
An HR consultant can help you to survive the summer
We can help you to map dependencies, plan cover and put simple handover structures in place before it gets busy.
We can also help you to think through how to look after the team members who are holding things together, so you’re not dealing with a retention problem when everyone’s back in September.
Get in touch if you’d like to talk it through.