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The holiday season often brings a notable increase in workload due to several key factors. Business seasonality drives demand peaks, especially in retail and service industries. Last-minute requests surge as customers and clients rush to complete transactions before year-end, coinciding with staff absences due to holidays.
This can exacerbate operational bottlenecks, where businesses fail to keep up with heightened demand due to inadequate preparation or inefficient systems. These pressures can disrupt business targets, strain operational capacities, and significantly risk employee burnout if not properly managed. Recognising and preparing for these challenges is crucial to maintaining smooth operations and supporting employee well-being during this busy period.
Understanding the holiday workload surge
The holiday season often brings a notable increase in workload due to several key factors. Business seasonality drives demand peaks, especially in retail and service industries. Last-minute requests surge as customers and clients rush to complete transactions before year-end, coinciding with staff absences due to holidays. This can exacerbate operational bottlenecks, where businesses fail to keep up with heightened demand due to inadequate preparation or inefficient systems. These pressures can disrupt business targets, strain operational capacities, and significantly risk employee burnout if not properly managed. Recognising and preparing for these challenges is crucial to maintaining smooth operations and supporting employee well-being during this busy period.
Planning Ahead
Planning ahead can significantly alleviate the amount of stress and pressure of an increased workload. Proactive planning strategies can enhance efficiency and overall productivity.
Creating a robust schedule
When teammates are briefed well in advance, the handover process is much smoother allowing plenty of time for walkthroughs, questions and demonstrations. This subsequently decreases the amount of stress the employee will face when taking on additional tasks.
Setting clear targets
Establishing clear targets is essential for guiding team members exactly towards company goals, particularly during holiday periods when workload increases and time management is critical. Leveraging technology and management software such as Asana, Jira and Wrike enhances task organisation, transparency and overall efficiency. These tools streamline workflow and help in managing to meet objectives promptly.
Krist Flint from Citizen highlights the importance of having a contingency plan to address emergencies or unexpected events. Another suggestion is to implement a strategy to manage excessive workloads when tasks become unmanageable for employees. Preparing for these scenarios ensures potential issues are anticipated and managed effectively therefore safeguarding business continuity and protecting employee well-being.
Effective delegation, teamwork and extra help
Identifying tasks for delegation
It is important to identify and prepare accordingly in preparation to effectively delegate and distribute tasks well before the deadlines. By assessing workload prior to holiday schedules, it enables employees to prepare and anticipate their new capacity while managing the adjusted workload. This allows time for management to delegate workload accordingly, allocate work to employees strategically and prevent overloading employees with excessive work.
Diversifying employee skill set
Employee training throughout the year not only increases overall capability within the company but also sets employees up for understanding additional workload. Diversifying the employee skill set gives overall confidence to the team. A benefit of ‘cross training’ allows for employees to be able to provide temporary support in other areas of the business during peak times.
Communication and coordination
Creating clear ’time off policies’ through the use of advance holiday request sheets, enables a more accurate anticipation of the workload that must be distributed between other employees. Setting defined notice periods helps to avoid overlapping requests ensuring smooth operations. Utilising a time off management systems such as HRcloud and Appoggeehr streamlines processes and helps facilitate seamless coordination of employee schedules.
Hiring temporary employees to relieve additional stress
Hiring temporary employees during the various holiday seasons is a form of investing in the wellbeing of your permanent employees. This approach helps the core team manage their workload and prevent burnout. It is vital to ensure both permanent and temporary staff feel valued and supported. To maximise the benefits of temporary employees, the onboarding process is essential to provide a smooth integration.
Managing stress and well-being
Work-life balance
Work-life balance strategies have been a key way to manage stress in the workplace. The ‘Burnout Report’ states that 71% of adults in the UK agreed that having friends and family outside of work would alleviate stress, whilst 51% agreed a healthy work life balance would reduce stress considerably.
Stress management techniques
A report by Benenden Health showed that 38.2% of employees identified their workload as the leading cause of workplace stress, which has subsequently caused mental health issues. This indicates that at peak holiday periods, when the workload typically surge, the risk of stress related mental health issues also escalates.
Effective stress management techniques can significantly mitigate these pressures, helping to maintain employee well-being.
Here are some examples of stress management techniques:
Regular exercise
Developing healthy responses (breathing techniques, meditation and mindfulness)
Reasonable adjustment plans at work
Communication with management
Professional support employee assistance programme, coaching, counselling
Leveraging support systems
When asked what aspects of their job have helped reduce workplace stress; 43% of UK adults stated ‘having a supportive line manager at work’ while 42% stated ‘having a supportive network of professional colleagues or peers’. These statistics help emphasise the need for good support systems to be in place at work. The report states that managers should feel well informed on workplace mental health plans to support employees. Systems such as reasonable adjustment plans and employee peer support groups should be considered in fostering open communication between employees and management.
Reflection
Post holiday season reviews allow managers to evaluate which strategies worked and which didn’t. By leveraging HR transformation software, it allows for detailed data analysis providing a clear understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your current approach. This data-driven evaluation helps make informed performance enhancing changes to future peak seasons.
