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R.L. IN MONTANA ASKS ...
My least favorite management duty is dealing
with time-off requests and making sure
the posts of those off are covered. I have some
employees who are workaholics, some who
take time off appropriately, and some who call
in with suspicious sick days for which I have to
take their word. Appropriate time off is great for
morale and avoiding burnout, but do you have
any advice for juggling it all, especially when
a sick employee’s absence throws a monkey
wrench into my flow?
THE STAFFING DOCTOR ANSWERS ...
Justified versus unjustified time off is a sandin-
the-gears conflict causing strife within
many companies. Regulations exist at both
the federal and state levels to govern time-off
standards, but they do not cover all situations,
because the truth of that lies in the perspective
of the beholder. On top of that for some operators
is the newly daunting task of providing
employees with paid sick days.
Attendance used to be mandatory. Remember
the days when you had tickets to a
once-in-a-lifetime concert, and your supervisor
at work uttered those famous words, “A
time off request is just that—a request, not an
automatic fulfillment program?” You would
sulk off trying to find someone to cover your
shift—or sell the tickets.
Those days are gone. If you tell someone
they “might” not get a day off that they requested,
they might quit on the spot. You used
to cajole people to come into work on their day
off to help cover a “broken shift,” and now you
practically beg some of your best and brightest
to stay home if there is even a slight chance they
are awaiting proof of an airborne contagion.
Employees are now arriving with a lack of communal
work ethic, language barriers, cultural
hurdles, and with a noticeably absent knowledge
of shared values.
When viewed as originally intended, time
off is part of the employee benefits package:
a perq. But when is time off too much? The
easy answer is when it has a negative effect
on the employee’s performance or is dragging
the business down. If someone is taking their
accrued time, vacation, flex, charity, or bonus
time, you can’t really argue, can you?
It seems to be a pretty universal experience
that time off is all well and good if we’re talking
about your days off, not so much if you’re
covering for someone who has gone off to Bora
Bora. The understanding and agreement lie in
your perspective and alignment with policies
and norms. You might never be able to get buyin
from someone who does not have children
to understand how being a parent seriously
requires previously untapped scheduling flexibility.
A person who has never faced death or
serious illness in their family may not relate to
the accompanying demands and blue notes.
Some companies who provide working
remotely as an option have simply “punted”
on attempting to manage employee time off.
These companies allow that anything goes, as
long as you get your work done.
The best approach to meet the rising demands
from employees whose time-off needs
have skyrocketed over the years is not to grab
it by the neck and throttle down the incoming
request pipeline or solely attempt to cover
everything by adding new policies, but to
build more flexibility into your system.
Work the part of this challenge that you
actually have some control over. The help you
can give yourself is cross-training. There has
been a lot of belt-tightening over recent years,
and maybe your training budgets took a hit, so
do yourself a favor: cross-train, station to station,
front to back, and back to front. Time-off
arm-wrestling will never improve your guest
satisfaction scores. The more jobs your employees
know how to perform, well, the less time-off
stress you will have—when it’s your time off.
Chase LeBlanc is the founder and CEO
of Leadagers, LLC, and is a hospitality
management performance coach. He is
also the author of High Impact
Hospitality: Upgrade Your Purpose,
Performance and Profits!
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