How to Manage the Summer PTO Rush

It’s summer and everyone wants to be out in the sun and on a beach. During this time your employees will want to take advantage of the paid time off days (PTO) they have accrued and rush out the door and onto the nearest beach, leaving your office space a little quiet. How can you manage to still run a successful business when most of your employees are out on PTO soaking up the sun? Here are a few ways that you can keep your cool in the summer months:

Get Organized

Instead of trying to deal with the fallout of all of your employees taking their PTO at once, keep leave visible. By keeping leave visible you are helping to prevent any issues from happening in the first place.

Provide a way for your employees to track the leave that they have remaining throughout the year. This can be as simple as putting everyone’s PTO schedules on a Google Calendar or sending out monthly email reminders. You could also consider implementing HR software, such as Breathe, to make scheduling conflicts a thing of the past. Instead of keeping a folder of papers documenting when your employees will be taking their PTO, Breathe helps you keep track of everything to do with your employees, all in one space online. By implementing this organizational tool, you are making PTO and other important events in your employees’ lives more visible.

Chill Out At the Office

From Memorial Day through Labor Day, a good way to boost employee morale is to incorporate fun summer incentives. Half-day Fridays, bringing in breakfast, and having team lunches are all good ways to liven up the summer months. Another way to make work a fun experience during the summer is to organize team outings and potlucks during the summer months to make the experience of coming to work more enjoyable. A study from Captivate Network found that 45% of workers felt more distracted during the summer; another study by Opinion also found that 66% of workers whose offices implemented summer Friday hours felt more productive and not less as a result. Allowing certain incentives during the Summer months helps your employees maintain a work-life balance, while also building trust and making your employees happier.

Download: Employee Engagement Myths

Incentives For Using PTO

One way that you can help make sure that there is not a huge influx of Summer PTO requests is to encourage these requests throughout the year. Getting your employees to spread out their time off will benefit your business enormously. Consider offering your employees perks for taking time off during slower periods, such as a gift card if you’re feeling especially generous and manage a slightly smaller team, you might even offer to pay for your employee’s flight to their chosen holiday destination in return for them taking the trip off-season, like the CEO of Full Contact. Incentives don’t have to mean purely rewards, a great incentive could even be simply reassuring your employees that work will be taken care of when they are gone. Many employees don’t like taking their PTO because they are afraid that they will have a stockpile of work to do when they get back from their vacation. To prevent this from happening establish a work-share system to divvy up work evenly to make sure that your business keeps moving.

Keep It Moving  

Just because a member or a few members of your team take some vacation time does not mean that you should have to sacrifice the production of your company. Zenefits suggests that managers should set clear expectations around project-based work and make sure their peers are left with the necessary files and contacts in order to finish the project. By ensuring that your employees are informed on what is expected of them when they take their PTO with deadlines to make, your company should continue to run smoothly during the Summer PTO request surge.