Summer holidays stressing you out?

Summer holidays are everyone’s saviour. For employer’s though, they often bring a tidal wave of stress.

From entitlements, managing requests (while keeping everyone happy!) and ensuring your business runs as normal, holidays can be hard work to handle.

Common holiday issues

Multiple requests: How would you handle multiple requests for the same date period, while keeping everyone happy? Being fair and consistent in your approach is crucial when it comes to accepting some requests, and rejecting others. If you do reject a request, remember, it’s important to have a business case for this.

Extra costs: Depending on the nature of your business, summer might be a key trading period, meaning you can’t afford to lose employees. Could you afford the cost of additional heads, like agency workers, for example?

Booking without permission: What would you do if an employee booked and paid for a holiday before putting in a request, and it turned out you couldn’t accept the request because of business needs? It may leave the employee in question disgruntled, so it’s important to handle with care.

Keeping track: What kind of method do you use to keep track of employees’ holidays? Are you making sure that you’re not granting too many days off, or giving part-time employees the same allowances as full-time employees?

Notice: When do employees lodge their holiday requests with you? Are you constantly battling with last minute holiday leave, and managing the impact on your business? If you are, it doesn’t sound like much fun, and you shouldn’t have to!

Managing workloads: Will an employee’s absence result in a project or task being halted? Or customers having to wait longer? If so, you’ll need to try and divide their workload to ensure the day-to-day running of your business isn’t affected.

Solutions

Clear contracts: to avoid confusion, your employees’ contracts should include particulars like: how many holiday days they’re entitled to, accruing leave and whether or not they’re entitled to bank holidays off.

Watertight policies: your policies will help to put business-wide processes in place. In these, you should delve into details like how much notice employees must give, and in what order you will process them e.g. in date and time order.

Your contracts and policies will help to nip any disputes in the bud and avoid any potential claims of unfair treatment. Not confident with contracts or policies? Don’t worry, we can help.

Transparency: Make holiday requests easy to access and view so that employees can plan their holidays accordingly. With our online platform – Atlas – everyone is able to see how many days they have remaining, whether their request was accepted or rejected and view their team’s holiday calendar to see what’s already been booked off.

Still baffled?

If your head’s still spinning, don’t stress. Pick up the phone, dial 0345 844 1111 and one of our expert advisors will be glad to help you.