How To Deal With Competing Holiday Requests Over the Christmas Period

With the Christmas period nearly upon us, many of my clients have been facing a flurry of leave requests from their staff over the Christmas period. However, not every one can go on leave at the same time as business continuity will be affected and you could easily lose a client as a result.

So, what approaches should employers take to handle the annual scramble for leave over the Christmas period? I can recommend four approaches which you should consider adopting before you get contemplate refusing anybody’s holiday leave.

1.) In general, there will most likely be a reduction in customer activity over the Christmas period. Does it make sense for your business to be paying your customer contact staff to be in the office when business enquiries will be at a minimum?

2.) Is it worth introducing a Christmas shutdown to take account of of the inevitable business slowdown and avoid the inefficiency of an office full of under deployed customer facing staff? Another advantage of this is that you can have some control over the length of the Christmas and you can clearly communicate it to clients, meaning that you can maintain good customer relations over the period.

3.) Another option would be to offer a pay incentive to key employees to be available to answer emergency calls from current or potential new clients. This would require them to check their e-mails and phone at agreed times and agreed days during the Christmas period.

4.) Another option, would be introduce some enhanced flexible working during the period. If you provide people with the opportunity to work at home or to work part-time hours over the period, you may find that more employees are willing or able to work for at least some during the Christmas period.

However, if you find that none of these approaches are suitable for you and you are still faced with a need to turn down staff leave over the Christmas period, then here are some considerations.

As an employer you are entitled to turn down leave as long as you can show good reason. Business continuity is a perfectly good reason. If an employee attempts to dictate a specific holiday date based on their rights under the Working Time Regulations, you are also entitled to over-ride this under those same regulations.

If you are having to choose between competing leave requests you should ensure that you do not discriminate on grounds of race, sex etc…when making your decision.

A good technique for dealing with competing leave requests could is to have an alternating system where if an employee takes leave in year 1, then they will work the period in year 2. This is a reasonably fair system.

Alternately, you could operate a first come first served basis, but this can be simplistic and while the process is fair, it may not always lead to a fair outcome, e.g. it could be the same more organized employees who always get the holidays over Christmas.

Finally, you can simply consider asking if either one of them is prepared to volunteer to work the Christmas period, reminding them both that this will mean more holiday during the summer months. You should ensure naturally that they get holiday priority in the summer months if they sacrificed their Christmas holiday to enable a colleague to take leave.

If you would like any help, or further advice on how to deal with competing leave requests over the Christmas period, then please do contact me.