Well summer is truly here upon us. We've felt its warmth and heat for the past month.
As a business we have had to navigate the heat in the office and ensuring the wellbeing of our staff, plus making time for the fact they are wanting to take holiday time off.
If I can be bold and talk about the weather. Whatever your work environment, we can all agree none of us are used our humid hot climate at this time of year. All we can do is manage it the best we can, whilst we have it. As with the great British weather, a rain storm and temperature drop is probably just around the corner.
We travel to other countries and see what they do. Having just come from Austria, they have a similar climate to us. They pretty much do what we do. Work the 9 to 5, with hospitality industry working lunchtime and evenings. One significant change they close nearly everything on a Sunday. Its like a ghost town there on a Sunday.
Spain with their heat opening up, early in the morning. Closing in the afternoon and then opening again in the evening. The split day.
So how can we manage our ever changing temperature conditions and keep our staff members happy as best we can. We have done for many years in our own office environment changed from tea and coffee drinking to supplying bottles of water and soft drinks in the fridge, cold drinks always at everyones disposal. The regular trip to the shop for an ice lolly also featuring in our days when its been over 30 degrees.
We relaxed our work wear, so on those days the staff could wear looser clothing. The ever ready cool airers and open windows. Keeping everyone hydrated a constant reminder. Even though we don’t move around too much, heat exhaustion is a real thing.
For those in the hospitality industry, weve seen closure of the kitchens on hot days. Who wants to work in temperatures of over 50 degrees. The reality of ovens on and stoves in a heat wave.
We don’t have health and safety rules in this country for hot weather, as it happens so infrequently. But its really encouraging to hear responsible employers out there, looking out for their staff.
Holiday requests and staffing
You’ve probably heard me talk about this before, but just thought I would share how we do it here with our team. Which has so far worked really well for us.
We use a large wallchart in our main office, which shows everyones holidays on a large calendar using different coloured markers. We ask that no more than two people off at any one time, and that notice is given for holiday requests. We also ask that the holidays split over the year, to balance things out. A holiday request form is completed and signed by the employee and the manager as confirmed as authorised.
We have holiday forms and have created holiday buddies. Ie two people doing very similar jobs not off at the same time for lengths of time. A day or two is fine but, for a week, the holiday buddies liaise with each other.
For larger companies, they may have a HR department who use software to manage the holiday schedule. Which will run on a larger scale but the same principle applies. Tracking the holidays of your staff, so that everyone doesn’t ask for time off at the same time is vital for a trading business. If everyone was off at the time , it puts too much pressure on staff that are not on holiday, and can create resentment. It can also stop the company functioning properly and not be able to service the customers it needs to.
Having a management system in place for holiday request allows the company to flow and one less headache to be thinking about. With all these changes weve faced in recent years, who needs something else to worry about.
