Your organization’s employees work hard throughout the year to ensure quality work, commitment to productivity and a bounty of profits. As diligently as your staff works, they also need to unwind and spend quality time with their families over the holiday season.
Naturally, your company’s executive team wants to keep their loyal employees happy to maintain a high-quality and long-lasting professional engagement. Unfortunately, this commonly accepted and enacted philosophy of good will surrounding the winter holidays can add stress for you and your hardworking human resource team.
There are some simple and effective ways that you can manage it all.
5 Simple-But-Essential Staffing Solution Tips to
Manage the Stream of Leave Requests Heading Your Way This Holiday Season
While your organizational leaders want to grant as much time off for employees as possible, there is still work to accomplish and clients to keep satisfied to protect your brand and your bottom line, notes GlassDoor.
Say that your office is open over the holidays, but you want to accommodate your staff’s holiday leave requests. By allowing your entire IT team to take the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day off without providing a backup IT staffing solution, for example, you would likely run into some serious technological problems that could cause undue risk. The same holds true for each of your valuable corporate support teams, including legal and compliance and finance and accounting. You don’t want to take the importance of the holidays lightly, for the sake of your employees, but you want your HR staff to enjoy the peace that the season promises too.
Maybe a list of 5 strategies to keep everyone happy for the holidays will help. Every HR manager strives for that goal, and it is certainly within your grasp.
Take a look to see which of the following 5 tips might apply to your own struggles to keep your organization’s engine running smoothly come December and early January.
1. Communicate Your Company’s Holiday Leave Policies Upon Hiring and Inform Staff of Ongoing Updates
BizFilings reminds HR managers that companies are not legally required to give employees time off for federal or state holidays, which means that much of what your employer grants is voluntary and on a goodwill basis. And of course, your employers probably want to taper off operations for a variety of reasons. Regularly meet with your business leaders to touch base on your holiday time off and requested leave policies, and always inform employees of any changes—positive or negative—as early as possible.
Image courtesy of Crown Staffing
2. Create a Holiday Calendar at the Beginning of Each Year for Optimal Planning
Some employees start thinking about and planning for the next holiday season as soon as the current on ends, so it can’t hurt to create a holiday staffing calendar at the beginning of the year to keep track of incoming requests. Incorporate your company leave policies into your decisions, as well as the order in which you receive leave requests. Once you enter requests into your electronic holiday calendar, keep a signed and dated hard copy in each employee’s file for proof of submission. You can also scan the request into PDF and keep it with the employee’s electronic file folder.
3. Give Employees a Firm Deadline to Submit Holiday Leave Requests
For staffing coverage, as well as for your own sanity, it is important to create firm deadlines to which you hold your employees responsible to submit requests for holiday time off. Their timely submission also gives staff a better chance at receiving their desired days off if you grant approval on a first-come, first-served basis.
4. Ask for Staff to Approach the Holidays with Good Will and Team Spirit
In the spirit of the holiday season itself, ask your staff for understanding if you anticipate a busy season at the office. You may need to ask key personnel to make a slight personal sacrifice to keep everyone satisfied. If several employees in finance and accounting ask for the same days off—say, those days immediately around Christmas and New Year’s—and if they made their requests at the same time, you may find yourself in a sticky position. Ask the staff to make compromises and to work together for a solution. The QuickBooks Resource Center notes that encouraging your team members to collaborate on these types of matters fosters a sense of teamwork instead of possible resentment they might feel if you hand down a final verdict.
5. Call in for Staffing Reinforcements
Sometimes it just makes the most sense to call a trusted professional staffing agency to help you fill in any holiday staffing gaps. You may need extra hands on deck to cover for employees on holiday leave, or you may need additional talent to pitch in on a huge year-end project like early tax preparation, a compliance review or developing a new database security policy.
Hyperlinked Sources:
The QuickBooks Resource Center