Introduction

In the weeks leading up to the most awaited holiday season—Christmas—most of your employees are concerned about the prospect of the Christmas holidays and the start of the party season. However, the end of the season also means excessive work, which can affect employee motivation and workforce productivity. In a recent survey by Sodexo, around 28% of employees avoid taking on new work as they wind down for Christmas breaks. 

Nevertheless, the holiday season can be crucial for many businesses, especially retail. Therefore, it is important to ensure that too many Christmas thrills don’t affect the end-of-Q4 profits.  

In today’s exclusive HRTech Cube article, we will provide you with expert resource planning suggestions on how to manage this seasonal period.

Table of Contents
1. Effectively Planning
2. Restate Open Door Policies
3. Creating a Balance at the Workplace
4. Focus on Employee Engagement
Final Thoughts

1. Effectively Planning 

The first and foremost is to plan your entire Christmas period; time flies quickly during December, and before we know it, Christmas has arrived, and with New Year on its heels. Therefore, by planning with management and the workforce, you can lay out deadlines as early as possible. However, before planning or committing to your EOY client’s reform with all the employees early in the month, they can plan around and for these deadlines and events as they approach Christmas.

2. Restate Open Door Policies

To survive this holiday season, any form of good management comes with its form of open-door policy. Therefore, communication between and across different levels of an organization is essential, and even your employees must be aware that their seniors are supporting them. During this festive period, you can implement total workforce management that will remind your employees to take some time out and manage their workplace stress accordingly. 

3. Creating a Balance at the Workplace

The best way to keep your employees productive is to create a good balance between festive fun and games and work in the workplace in the lead-up to Christmas. This will engage your employees to participate in different activities. However, in an attempt to encourage a festive spirit, you can retain control and get your tasks completed by planning out the most important tasks and removing those that can be done in the next quarter.

4. Focus on Employee Engagement

This Christmas, to boost employees’ morale and engagement, try to implement mobile application-based workforce management tools that can plan events and requests on work emergencies without being at work. It’s common to find that agents working the same shift and activity usually trade their shifts to exchange their lunch and/or break for a more beneficial time. Therefore, implementing shift trading, especially during the holiday season, will reduce the chance of the agent going off sick. 

Final Thoughts

A positive workplace should have the right balance between recognizing the time of the year and driving the organization toward key business objectives, especially to ward off the January blues in the New Year. Therefore, plan the holiday season and discuss the objective for the new year. This will allow your employees to offer better ideas on how things can be improved, creating a greater sense of togetherness, which can work wonders for teamwork, cohesion, and staff morale.

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