Your employees love nothing more than a short week or a federally mandated holiday, but as a business, these interruptions can hurt your profits and productivity. So, what are your options and how do you deal with a mid-week holiday? Kavaliro has a few ideas!
Shut It All Down
Most companies know when their peak seasons are and when their slow seasons are. If your slow season is during a holiday period, try giving your office the whole week off or give them the days after the holiday off and close the office. This could potentially save you money and give your teams the refresh and reset they need to perform better at their jobs.
Manage the PTO
One of the biggest problems teams have is when everyone wants off work, yet the office is still open. Managing who can use PTO is one way to mitigate having your whole group off for the day. At Kavaliro, our rule is that a few people from each department need to be working when the business is open. With the team knowing this it ensures they set their schedules around the needs of the business. How and where a team member works is a different subject we will cover below.
Work from Home
With the rise of telecommuting and remote work, why not give your team the option to work remote. This ensures that your team is still working, but they can do so from anywhere. Instead of making a team member take PTO so they can enjoy a long weekend with their family, allow them to work remotely. This works well when there is a holiday on a Thursday. Allow your team to work from anywhere on Friday so they can continue to be productive and enjoy some flexibility.
Flex Hours
If you work in the accounting and finance department or even customer service, you might not be able to let your employees work remote or take off time. An excellent option for situations like this is to provide flex time. Allow your team to set their schedules. We some times offer this option at Kavaliro, and it works well. Each team member communicates to their manager what "shift" they would like to work; the manager ensures there is coverage at all times and sets a schedule. With this option, make sure your employees clearly know the rules of flex time and that if there is an emergency, they might still have to log on and work.
Alternate Holidays
If your business has to stay open during a mid-week holiday, an option is to alternate who gets off what holidays. Allow your team members to take off one holiday week but let them know that in exchange they will have to work a different holiday week. This is a fairly common practice when it comes to Doctors setting their hospital schedules. Based on seniority, they can pick which holidays they would like to work and which they want off, this makes the practice fair for all team members and ensure that you have adequate coverage throughout the holidays.
While not all of these methods will work for your office, there is some benefit to trying them out. If you are thinking about changing the way your company handles holidays, we recommend trying things out with a small team first and then scaling up with the rest of the company. Be sure that ideas are clearly communicated to every member of your office, so they know what is expected of them both during the transition and after you have steeled on a holiday work schedule.