How to Juggle Your Schedule Around Summer Vacations

How to Juggle Your Schedule Around Summer Vacations

It’s that time of year! With warm temperatures and perfect beach weather outside, the last thing most workers want to do is get stuck on the job. It’s vacation season. Are you prepared?

Here are a few tips to help you juggle your schedule when your employees are hitting the road for summer vacation.

Plan for the Non-Planners

In a perfect world, all of your employees would have planned their vacations long in advance. You would have plenty of warning that they’d need time off. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world and many employees don’t plan ahead.

As an employer, you want to be fair and give your team time off. To do this, you must plan for the non-planners. Build in a little cushion room to your schedule so you can afford to be down an employee for a few days. Your employees will thank you for your flexibility and you will keep your operations running smoothly.

Consider Seasonal Ups and Downs

For some businesses, traffic slows down during the summer months. For others (especially those in the hospitality industry) business picks up.

While you’re planning your schedule for the summer months, consider how seasonality impacts you. If you’re especially busy, it might be a good idea to hire seasonal employees to fill in so your year-round team can get a much needed break.

Define A Process For Last Minute Getaways

It’s bound to happen. An employee will inevitably want to take a last minute vacation or a long weekend at the beach. When that happens, you want to say yes but you need to keep the team who will be left behind in mind. These are the people who will be picking up the vacationing team member’s slack.

Defining a process ahead of time can help enable last minute travels without leaving your remaining employees in the lurch. For example, you might want to require that the person traveling find his own replacement on the schedule.

Allow Flexibility in Your Scheduling Process

It’s not uncommon for someone on a road trip to want to extend their vacation a few days. Can you allow them to do that?

By using an employee scheduling app, such as ScheduleBase, you can continue your process for last minute getaways (requiring the employee to find his own replacements) by giving your team anywhere/anytime access to the schedule. Instead of calling and burdening you, the employee is able to fill in the gap and determine whether he can realistically extend his vacation. He will appreciate the flexibility and it’ll take a burden off your plate.

Summer travels don’t have to put a strain on your team. By making the schedule accessible anywhere, anytime and defining expectations among your employees, you enable them to plan their own vacations without leaving your team in a bind.

Author Profile Jon Forknell is the Vice President and General Manager of Atlas Business Solutions, Inc., a software marketing company specializing in employee scheduling software, including ScheduleBase employee scheduling software, and other business software solutions. In the past, Jon has been recognized by the U.S. Small Business Administration as a SBA Young Entrepreneur of the Year. Atlas Business Solutions was named as one of Software Magazine’s Top 500 Software Companies in 2004 through 2007 and again in 2010, 2013 and 2014.