Why Ignoring the ‘Busyness Challenge’ Could Ruin Your Vacation

As managers, facing the vacation season always proves challenging. When the first person approaches you with the request to take off a day or two for a long weekend, or another employee is planning a one or two-week family vacation, the stress of ‘how is the work going to get done’ begins. 

Have you ever asked yourself one or more of the following questions:

• How did the plan you had to provide backup for everyone on your team not get executed?  Where did the time go?
• How are you going to train the right people with the right skills and competencies to get the job done right? 
• How can you tell some employees that they must reschedule their vacations due to a lack of backup? 
• What is going to happen to employee morale? 
• What is your boss going to think of your planning skills? 
• How did this happen again? 
  
  

The Yearly Malady

This yearly malady happens when, over a year, you have allowed yourself and your team to fall victim to the ‘busyness syndrome’. It often sounds like and feels like, “I can’t plan for developing appropriate backup this week because everyone, including myself, is so busy!” We postpone planning for employee development and backup until next week, month, or quarter. And then reality sinks in and we are desperately facing vacation season. And once again, we are unprepared. 

Growth and Change:  The Double Whammy!

As companies are in growth acceleration mode, change is happening all around us, and employee skills are changing, eroding, or becoming obsolete. The old excuse of “I didn’t get around to it” has much more dire consequences. With growth and change, a lack of backup planning can have serious business implications extending far beyond your department.  

It’s Time to Deal with Vacation, Back up, and the ‘Busyness Challenge’   

It may be late in the season, but there is still time to begin to attack this problem head-on.  Here are some emergency tips:

• Go back to your job descriptions and revise them if necessary. Be sure to break down the tasks so they have tangible definitions and are measurable. 
• Identify the first set of tasks that a designed employee can immediately and easily begin to learn to provide the required emergency relief—that means today!
• Take the job description again and determine the next set of more complex tasks that a backup employee needs to learn. 
• Now, it’s time to finally develop a real and realistic development plan with a designated and specific timeline. 

Remember, since you are in emergency mode, you may not have a perfect plan, but you have started to create the beginning elements of a departmental backup plan. Now, you can start to use this emergency plan to establish and implement a rigorous and permanent plan that should be in place for any contingency. This plan should also be used for continuous employee development, which is required for human resource capacity planning and forecasting. This should be a routine part of your management role as a manager. 

It’s time to start this process now. If you postpone it again, you will only be in the same situation. Only you can be the catalyst in this process. Beware of the tyranny of urgency. That’s what got you or your team to this point!

We invite you to download our eBook: "Human Asset Management Strategy: A New Approach," which provides a multifunctional guide to human capital capacity planning.