5 Efficient Ways to Manage Employee Time-off in Diwali 2022
With Diwali around the corner, it is time for festivities. It is the time when most employees seek to take time off so that they can spend it with their families. As an entrepreneur or a founder, while you might want to support your employees during this time, managing work and ensuring business continuity becomes critical.
Here are a few tips that can create an atmosphere of trust and transparency while allowing your employees a fair chance to take time off and enjoy themselves:
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Share a Leave-Tracker
While everyone would want time off around the festival season, it might not be possible to grant everyone leave at the same time. The easiest way to sort this out is to create a leave tracker that is accessible to all employees and ask them to create leave requests in advance so that you can grant leaves based on a first come, first served. Ensure that all the employees know the format and process of submitting a leave request.
This can also help the teams see who is taking leave and when and plan their tasks accordingly.
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Create Transparency
Borrowing from the above-mentioned point, creating a leave tracker is the easiest way to create transparency. It completely negates any doubts of favouritism or partiality.
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Let your team create their own workarounds
As a founder or CEO, you might be tempted to come up with alternate plans all on your own. But hold back and empower your employees to figure out how they want to manage the leaves in their teams so as to ensure business continuity. Let them plan it and allot time-offs accordingly.
You can go a step further and allow your employees to find their own replacements temporarily. But let all the replacements be approved by their respective managers to ensure the right skill set required for the roles. The replacements should be comfortably able to do their jobs and not just fill in the seats - like a teacher subbing for a principal or vice-versa.
If you do choose to go down this path, let your employees know how you approve a replacement and this can help them find the right substitute and reduces your responsibility, and smoothens the time-off request process.
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Have Flexible Work Policies
During the pandemic, it has become apparent that flexible work policies are here to stay and they create happy employees.
According to a survey by EY, nine in ten employees want flexibility in where and when they work.
- More than 54% of employees wanted flexibility in their timings and when they work
- 40% of employees wanted flexibility in where they work
- And on average, employees showed a preference for working 2-3 days remotely, even after the pandemic
- And finally, 67% of employees said that they believed that their productivity was not affected and can be accurately measured irrespective of location.
It is becoming increasingly evident that to attract top talent, manage off-time, and reduce attrition, one must adopt flexible work policies. This enables employees to manage work and home without really needing to take leaves and possibly reduces the number of leaves taken by an employee.
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Hiring part-timers
One of the easiest ways to manage not just employee off-time, but peak seasons, new launches, and more is to hire part-timers. They can be available for the short bursts of time that you need them and support your teams.
FlexiBees specializes in solving this problem for many of our clients. We have been able to provide them with experienced talent who can hit the ground running and take over from your existing team, if and when required.
You can read more about the kind of roles we have fulfilled here.
While festive seasons are a time of joy and celebration, it can be challenging to manage business especially if the festive season is a time when you see a surge in demand for your product or service. Hope these tips will help you better manage your employee time-offs. If you need further assistance in managing the workflow during this time, do reach out to us to hire flexible talent.
