Stop Worrying About Holiday Coverage and Follow These 6 Steps
The holidays are almost here, which means hot chocolate, gifts, and spending time with family. Yet, the holidays can be stressful for managers, business owners, or anyone responsible for staff coverage. Being understaffed over the holidays almost seems inevitable. But don’t worry, there are steps you can take to prepare.
To set yourself up for success, you’ll want to plan for vacations, sick leave, and an increase in customers. We’ll outline everything you need to do to ensure you are ready for the holidays.
Why It’s Important
Preparing for the holidays is important even if you’re not in an industry that booms over Christmas. Many employees take vacation time or get sick around Christmas. So you want to have enough staff coverage.
Being fully staffed increases your business’s productivity and morale. The holidays can be stressful for anybody, so you’ll want to promote a positive work environment. Otherwise, you can risk burnout and turnover.
How to Keep Your Company Staffed Over the Holidays
Luckily, you can take steps to staff up for the holidays. Follow our top six steps to ensure holiday coverage.
Set deadlines for time off requests
You don’t want to prevent staff from taking a Christmas vacation. But you can set a deadline for notice to take personal time off. A standard amount of notice is about a month. This will allow you enough time to plan shifts and workloads and hire extra staff if necessary.
Offer employees to pick up shifts
After you know how much holiday coverage you need, you can promote extra shifts to employees. Lots of people are looking for extra cash around the holidays. You could also offer overtime pay for picking up more shifts.
Provide incentives for employees
On top of overtime pay, there are other incentives you can offer your employees to work over the holidays. Some ideas are:
Gift cards or vouchers
Free meals during their shifts
Extra holiday time to take throughout the year
Hire for holiday jobs
Another way to ensure staff coverage is to hire temporary or casual staff over the holidays. We recommend hiring for temporary seasonal jobs a month before the start date. This will guarantee enough coverage in time.
If you are looking for holiday coverage, reach out to our team at AmbiMi. We’ll make sure to fill your seasonal jobs to make this holiday season a breeze.
Prioritize tasks and set deadlines
After you cover the shifts, it’s time to look at tasks. Help each employee prioritize their responsibilities and set realistic deadlines for each. Get other managers to do so with their staff members too. This will ensure that urgent items are getting done.
Check-in with staff
Occasionally check in with permanent and temporary staff to see how they are managing their workload. Tensions tend to run high around the holidays, so you want to ensure they aren’t getting burnt out.