How to manage summer holidays without putting pressure on your team

With summer around the corner, more of your employees might be off on holiday than usual.

If you’re only a team of ten, two people off at the same time means 20% of your workforce is unavailable. That can have a real impact on day-to-day operations, particularly if you haven’t planned properly for it.

The good news is that a little preparation can make a big difference. You don’t need a complicated staffing strategy, but you do need to think ahead about workloads, cover and the people who will be keeping things running.

So, what does planning properly actually look like?

Let’s take a look.

Map your dependencies before anyone goes anywhere

Before the holidays kick in, work out who owns what and what happens when they’re away. It’s easy to assume someone else can pick up a task, only to discover that they’re the only person who knows how to do it.

For each person, ask:

• What can’t wait while they’re away?
• What can be paused or simplified for a couple of weeks?
• Who else could cover the essentials if they had to?
• Are there any deadlines, client commitments or projects that need to be completed before they leave?

If nobody else can cover something critical, that’s worth fixing now rather than discovering it halfway through someone’s holiday.

It doesn’t have to be complicated. A handover document, a short walkthrough or a shared folder containing key information can all help. Make sure important contacts, deadlines and outstanding tasks are documented, and give the person covering enough time to ask questions before their colleague leaves.

Where possible, avoid relying on one person to hold all the knowledge about a particular process. Sharing that knowledge throughout the year makes holiday cover much easier and gives the business greater resilience in the long term.

If the gap is too big to cover internally, temporary support may also be worth considering.

Protect the people who stay

This can be easy to miss, and it’s often where the longer-term problems begin.

When the team is short, the people who are in will usually just get on with it. They might take on extra tasks, respond to more queries or work harder to keep everything moving.

But getting on with it while covering for two colleagues for three weeks is a lot to ask without acknowledging the extra pressure.

If that becomes the norm every summer, employees can start to feel that their willingness to help is being taken for granted. Over time, that can contribute to frustration, burnout and retention issues.

A few things that can actually help:

• Acknowledge the extra effort. Tell people directly that you know it’s busier and you appreciate their help. It takes two minutes, but it matters.
• Prioritise the workload. Decide upfront what can wait rather than letting everything get stretched at once. Not every task needs to be treated as urgent.
• Reduce unnecessary demands. Cut meetings and non-essential tasks during peak holiday periods. If something can wait until everyone’s back, let it.
• Keep an eye on capacity. Check whether the remaining team can realistically manage the workload, rather than assuming they’ll find a way.
• Check in during the period. Don’t wait until everyone is back to find out how things went. A quick conversation can help you spot issues before they become bigger problems.

It’s also worth remembering that employees who are covering extra work still need time to take their own breaks and manage their usual responsibilities. Holiday cover shouldn’t mean the people who remain are expected to work at an unsustainable pace.

Get ahead of client expectations

If your capacity is going to be reduced, let clients know before a deadline gets missed.

A little communication upfront can go a long way. If response times might be slower, a key contact is going to be unavailable or a project deadline needs adjusting, explain this in advance and agree on a plan where necessary.

Most people are far more understanding when they know what to expect. They’re a lot less happy when they have to chase an update or discover a delay after the fact.

Consider setting up an out-of-office message that directs urgent queries to an appropriate colleague, making sure that person knows they’re listed as a contact and is prepared to help.

For ongoing projects, review upcoming deadlines before the holiday period begins. Where possible, bring forward essential work, agree on realistic timescales and make sure clients know who to contact if something urgent comes up.

The aim isn’t to make excuses for reduced capacity. It’s to manage expectations, maintain trust and avoid putting unnecessary pressure on your team when things get busy.

Use it as a stress test

If one person being off causes real disruption, pay attention to that.

It tells you where your single points of failure are, which processes only work because one person runs them and where knowledge needs to be shared more widely.

While this might create some short-term challenges, it also gives you useful insight into how the business operates. You may discover that certain tasks are unnecessarily dependent on one individual, that your processes need documenting or that the team needs additional training.

Once the holiday period is over, take a little time to review what worked and what didn’t.

Ask your team where they struggled, which tasks were harder to manage than expected and what would have made things easier. You can then use that feedback to improve your processes, plan future cover and identify any gaps in your team’s skills or capacity.

Rather than treating summer holidays as a disruption to get through, use them as an opportunity to make the business more resilient for the rest of the year.

An HR consultant can help you plan for the summer

Managing annual leave in a small business can be a balancing act. You want your employees to enjoy their well-earned time off, your clients to receive the service they expect and your business to keep running smoothly.

We can help you map dependencies, plan cover and put simple handover structures in place before things get busy.

We can also help you review workloads, consider your approach to annual leave and think through how to support the employees who are holding things together. The aim is to avoid short-term pressure turning into a longer-term people problem when everyone’s back in September.

A little planning now can make summer easier for everyone.

Get in touch if you’d like to talk through how to prepare your team for the holiday season.