With summer fast approaching, there can be a bit of anxiety in the office about the skeleton staff. As an employer, there’s not much you can do about staff holidays. However, there are some things you can do to avoid an unproductive and stressed office during the summer months...
Staff
Having access to a talent pool available at your disposal means that you will never have downtime on your work. With SmartPA you can scale your service to suit your business so support is there when you really need it. When partnering with SmartPA, you gain access to the largest remote skillset pool, so if it’s your marketing, sales or HR team who are functioning at skelton level, you can get the exact expertise to fill the gap.
Handovers
Handovers are key. Having a good base in place for each role including all passwords, the current status on ongoing projects, a “who’s who” for each supplier, a plan for situations that might arise and a “must get done” list. Make sure you staff are sitting down in person to talk through and actually hand over (see what we did there) the document. One thing that is often missed is inbox access. Ensure that at least someone in the organisation has access to the absent employee’s inbox and checks daily incase anything urgent comes through. Sometimes, spreading the workload across remaining staff can help, especially if you are matching skill sets to tasks.
Skeleton workload
This isn’t always possible, but for some companies, planning your workload or campaigns in advance to avoid the summer months when you know people are likely to be on holiday will mean that those who are in the office don’t have an unnecessarily large workload.
Notice
As an employer, you can request an employee gives you as much notice as possible if they are taking a significant amount of time off work. This will make it easier to plan for the summer months.
Online working platforms
It is incredibly difficult for people to pick up on work when they have no visibility on previous conversations, reports or projects. Project management platforms such as Trello, monday.com and Slack are really useful tools not only during handovers, but also to your business as a whole.
