Most employees are waiting for the end-of-year holidays after a long and hectic business year. Your work team is looking forward to Christmas break combined with New Year’s Eve—and that’s a well-needed break. In order to enjoy gatherings with friends and family, many of your employees want paid time off in addition to Christmas. But we know that’s challenging for employers, especially for those in retail or service sectors. Thus, developing a fair team’s holiday work schedule gets complicated, especially if you want to retain your employees while balancing your business needs.
So, to strategically manage your workforce holidays, develop work-holiday policies, define medical and PTO leaves allowed, and attract employees with floating holidays at some other time of the year to avoid a blackout on your most productive days. Better communication, preplanning, and solid policies blended with team management tools can take your headaches away.
So, here are 12 tips to make your team happy with the holiday schedule.
Manage Your Employee Work Holiday Schedule
Your staff management and their work-holiday schedule need attention, time, and a visionary approach at the start of each business year. This helps you secure your productive days alongside happy employees. Here are some pro tips:
Consult Your Team About Holiday Choices
Have a dialogue with every member of your team and know their holiday preferences earlier. This is effective two-way communication to process and implement a holiday calendar, which must be designed with careful consideration instead of pushing everyone on the same boat and regretting losing your high-earning days. This consultation will also ensure teamwork, better business rules, and strong communication bonds between employers and employees.
Ask your employees, “Which time of the year do they need paid leaves?, Are you willing to work overtime in case of overwork? Or, do you mind informing the company about your holiday plan before waiting for approval?
Record their preferences, construct clear expectations from both sides, inform your team that they may need to work on their holidays but will be paid as per labor law, and share a preliminary work holiday schedule with them. This is the best solution to engage your team and stay focused, but keep employees in the loop, even if some compromises are necessary.
Balance Holidays Evenly Throughout the Year
It’s necessary to draw a clear policy about holidays, ensuring these are split through summer, spring, fall, and winter instead of all at once at year-end. Let your employees enjoy their holidays according to their religion and culture. This makes your calendar year balanced, letting your employees boost their energy by planning a trip. Designing your work and holiday time-off policy is a practical approach to engage employees. Ensure your team’s holiday work schedule in a way that none of your team members feel exhausted with workloads.
Strengthen The Trust Bond with Team
Though to many businesses it’s almost impossible to shut down during extremely productive periods like Christmas, New Year, or Easter, especially for retail, cosmetics, medicines, restaurants, food deliveries, and other similar sectors. However, if you have the capacity to announce holidays or time off in these days, keep the ball in your court. None of your employees will leave in the long run, but still, decisions and workforce strategies must be in your company’s favor. The act gives your employees more comfort, motivation, and trust.
Cut-Off Shifts During Holidays
Take your team on board before planning a holiday, as this is quite needed. Holidays are important, but if your project needs to be delivered on Wednesday, which is a national day off by the government. Try to manage by cutting off your employees and their shifts, with only those people who are directly linked to the tasks. And compensate them later with less important workdays or by offering paid overtime.
Schedule Team’s Work Holiday With Management Software
Manage all your company’s data and policies using simple and efficient management tools that reduce your burden. Employee scheduling of shifts, start and end times, attendance, leaves, holidays, and workload can all be tracked and monitored through time tracking and scheduling software. They allow you to plan and implement better business strategies. You will find features of payroll, invoicing, client dealing, AI, integrated apps, budgeting, resource-side team management, and dealing with her work holidays and times.
StaffWatcher is a simple yet efficient tracker that allows you to manage your team through a desktop screen. Along with your overall team scheduling, you can also get a summary of employees’ schedules and set time limits for each team member.
Divide Tasks And Duties
The holiday schedule can be well constructed if you divide jobs and duties among employees. Allow your team to have enough room to manage work, but if one employee is overburdened, then divide the task between the two to ensure everyone enjoys the coming holiday. You can also facilitate by offering work from home, half-days, exchanging shifts, and letting the whole team accomplish tasks and relax at the end.
Manage Employee Scheduling, monitor attendance, and track real-time activities with Staffwatcher FREE!
Offering a floating holiday is another way to draw in and retain your staff members while encouraging them to do their best work. Gaining the trust of your employees can be achieved by offering incentives, bonuses, paid overtime, and flexible work schedules.
Final Thoughts
Initiating a holiday schedule focusing on employees’ preferences can be a time-consuming and demanding thing. But implementing some clean, transparent, and top-of-the-line strategies can help businesses grow with amazing team performance. Consider establishing open lines of communication with staff and utilizing employee scheduling software. Facilitating our team with work from home, reducing workloads, switching shifts, compensating holidays, and floating holidays, along with the national days off, can be an incredible way to enhance coordination among team members. Moreover, using AI, integrated apps, and team management software will be helpful to manage team’s holiday work schedule.
