Holiday Management

This will bite you on the bum if you don't have clear rules and a stringent process for managing holidays. With a small team, having more than one person off at a time will cause you pain, especially if something unexpected happens as it is likely due to Murphys Law! During our first Christmas we had 2 sister's working for us, who begged us to go home for 2 weeks over Christmas and New Year, we naively agreed. One other of the team was disgruntled about this but otherwise it didn't look as if it would cause any issues, as we employed 7 people in total. Then 2 things happened, on Christmas Eve one of the team was involved in a car crash, not a big smash but enough to get her signed off with whiplash for 2 weeks, so we were down to 4, then a wave of flu hit the team and suddenly we were down to 3 people to cover the busy Christmas short week trading, the only option was for us to work over the whole period all day every day. Since then we have adopted the following rules!

• Holidays must be agreed with the manager before they are booked.
• Only one person off at any one time.
• Holidays are from Monday to Sunday, so only cover one weekend.
• No holidays in December.
• Holidays can't be carried over between years.
• Manager can't have holidays at the same time as the owner.

You can agree your own set of rules depending on the location and trading pattern of your business, but it's important to set these rules down early.  The accepted norm in hospitality is that bank holidays are treated like any other day, so your team will be allowed 28 days holiday per year if they work full time. You need to plan these carefully as it has a big impact on your service levels and wage bill. Most people will look at having a week in autumn, and winter and 2 weeks in the summer, this will leave 8 odd days to book off over the year, the last thing you want is to have everyone trying to cram their holidays into the last few weeks of the holiday calendar, so plan them carefully. Be careful of the rules around what you can pay as holiday pay, as it's quite complicated, please see the link for additional info on the right.