How to Organize Vacation Time In Your Company
The legislation on paid vacation is quite rich and is an integral part of personnel management. Without necessarily mastering all the legal rules, it is necessary to know some basic concepts, customs, conventions, or agreements specific to the company, especially for special time off such as births, marriages.
Organize Your Team’s Vacation More Easily
Managing your team’s vacation time is part of your management responsibility, just like your business. The clearer and more familiar the rules are, the easier it is to enforce them.
To facilitate organization, the manager first defines the organizational principles specific to the team. You can ask your employees not to be absent at the same time or to plan a backup so as not to harm business activities. It is in your interest to empower your employees and let them organize themselves rather than being controlling; they will be much more inclined to make sure that everything goes well.
To anticipate possible disputes, you can also set priorities in the interests of equity, for example by giving employees with children in school the opportunity to leave first during school holidays, or by considering those whose spouses have mandatory holidays.
In particular, pay attention to those who have accumulated many vacation days. To avoid being overwhelmed, encourage them to take time off early in the year: you will have a better overview of the department’s organization and the continuity necessary for maintaining business activity.
Ensure the Continuity of your Employees
If your company does not close during the summer, ensure minimum continuity (rerouting telephone lines, transmission of possible schedules or files) and ask your employees to inform their business contacts of their return date, via their voicemail or an out-of-office email message that includes the people to contact during their absence.
Delegate your Day-to-Day Business
Your own vacation should not be synonymous with telecommuting! To prevent the necessity of being contacted while you are out of the office, delegate ongoing tasks to one of your colleagues or a direct report. Provide them full information and check that they have everything necessary to be able to act in your absence. Finally, remember to check with your own boss that no important decisions related to your job responsibilities will be made in your absence. These steps will allow you to depart with peace of mind and recharge your batteries while you are away.
Adapt to your Audience
The manager must ensure, on a regular basis, that his employees have not accumulated too much vacation. Quality of work life includes ensuring that employees take regular vacations. On the other hand, in some companies employees can obtain payment for unused paid time off, under certain conditions and within a limited number of days.
Using an automated solution to facilitate planning is a good tactic. Ideally, you’ll want to set up an annual schedule with instantly updated vacation balances and automatic alerts, which each employee can consult to see their own status. This schedule should have a consolidated view for the manager, and ensure easy monitoring for the payroll department; it should also enable you to move from empirical monitoring to intelligent management.
For more on this topic, discover how to organize your staff list, evaluate the performance of your employees, and manage in-company training.
