3 Ways SMBs Can Prepare for Holiday Season Success

Quick look: As the year winds down, the holiday season is an opportunity to connect and celebrate with friends and family. At the same time, many businesses remain open and operational, and may have services to provide or deadlines to meet. Discover how business leaders can successfully juggle completing necessary tasks and providing staff with much-deserved time off—and how a PEO can help them achieve this balance.

The winter holidays are a busy time for many employees: there are special moments to celebrate with loved ones, school closings for working parents to manage, and likely some lingering deadlines to meet.

To smoothly navigate these demands and establish success in the year to come, employers must both maintain productivity and provide much-needed flexibility to their staff.

Three activities can help business leaders achieve this: thoughtful scheduling, proactive productivity planning, and authentic employee recognition:

1. Careful holiday scheduling

The end of the year can be busy, no matter the industry. For instance, retailers may experience an uptick in consumer spending, while marketing firms could have time-sensitive assignments to wrap up.

Work schedules during this time require business leaders to maintain a delicate balance; if employees work too few hours, business obligations may slip through the cracks, and customer service could decline. However, if staff aren’t given ample time to rest, relax, and celebrate, your organization could face lower employee satisfaction, increased burnout, and heightened turnover. Here are some ways to avoid those negative consequences:

Define and communicate coverage needs

Well ahead of the holiday season, business leaders should be transparent about the upcoming workload and provide clear expectations to their teams. For example, a retail store could set “blackout days” for workers to avoid taking off. Communicating these guidelines in advance can ensure business coverage while allowing employees to schedule their much-deserved time during periods that make sense.

Enact a paid time off (PTO) request deadline

Setting a cut-off date for holiday-season PTO request submissions encourages workers to make restful or festive plans proactively and prevents last-minute callouts on busy days.

Disclaimer: PTO policies are subject to specific legal guidelines and company policies, which employers must follow to ensure compliance. PTO eligibility, accrual, and usage may vary based on location and employment terms. Employers are responsible for adhering to federal, state, and local regulations governing PTO.

Offer incentives

For some, the holidays can be hard; research shows that this season causes nearly 40% of people to feel more stress, depression, and anxiety. While everyone manages their mental health differently, some may want to work to distract themselves, or earn some extra money. Offering increased holiday pay or an extra day off is a great way to say “thank you” for working on hard-to-staff days and can provide some much-needed extra padding to your staff’s wallets.

Be mindful of compliance

It’s crucial to remain aware of any employment laws pertaining to your business’s holiday work schedule.

For instance, while private employers aren’t typically required to provide paid holidays to nonexempt employees, if an exempt employee works any part of a workweek, their employer generally must pay their full salary for it (even if there are holidays or closures).

When this blog was written, Rhode Island was the only state requiring premium holiday pay. Per RI General Law 25-3, most employers must pay their workers at least 1.5 times their standard pay rate for any work performed on Sundays and the following holidays:

• New Year’s Day
• Memorial Day
• Juneteenth
• Independence Day
• Victory Day (the second Monday in August)
• Labor Day
• Columbus Day
• Veterans Day
• Thanksgiving Day
• Christmas Day

Disclaimer: This is not an exhaustive list of employment laws. Please refer to your regional and industry-specific legal guidelines or consult your legal counsel for detailed and specific information.

2. Proactively preserve productivity

The key to maintaining a steady workflow during the holiday season lies in thinking ahead and building a robust group of talent capable of stepping in when their colleagues are off. Some steps to do so include:

Hiring seasonal staff

Seasonal employees are those hired temporarily to meet increased demand throughout the year, often during the winter holidays. Approximately 75,000 U.S. seasonal workers are in industries ranging from accounting to tourism. Seasonal employees can help organizations:

• Reduce burnout levels and turnover
• Provide consistent levels of customer service
• Decrease lost sales
• Maintain a positive reputation
• Potentially save on future recruiting costs

Cross-training ahead of time

Cross-training, or teaching workers tasks outside their primary job responsibilities, pays off year-round, but especially during the holiday season. When employees know how to fill their coworkers’ gaps, the entire workforce benefits from that stability.

This training can also contribute to your staff’s professional development by helping them expand their skill sets, potentially preparing them to be hired from within for other roles.

3. Show appreciation to your team

The holidays are the perfect time to thank your hard-working employees. Three ways to show this appreciation include:

• Celebrating together: An end-of-year celebration is more than just a tradition; it helps create a positive and engaged workforce by boosting morale, strengthening team bonds, reducing stress, and rewarding effort. These parties are also an opportunity to recognize various cultural and religious traditions, demonstrating a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). To ensure everyone feels included, consider ways to engage virtual employees, such as hosting a hybrid event, offering online activities, or sending celebration kits, so all team members can participate, no matter where they work.
• Giving a thoughtful gift: A personalized gift or a handwritten card from a manager to their direct report goes a long way in expressing genuine gratitude.
• Establishing an employee recognition program: These strategic programs show thankfulness year-round by aligning with the company’s goals and values and rewarding workers’ efforts with awards, shoutouts, prizes, and more.

This appreciation can have a tremendous business impact. Per Forbes, employees who receive regular recognition are more productive, safer, less absent, and more likely to stay with the company.

PEO: Your partner for holiday season preparation

Employers face quite the challenge during the winter months: they must ensure that work objectives are completed while allowing their staff (and themselves) time for much-needed relaxation. This isn’t impossible, but it does require advanced planning—something especially cumbersome for small business leaders.

Luckily, a professional employer organization (PEO) can help them accomplish this. A PEO is a type of human resource (HR) outsourcing provider that helps small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) manage their HR, employee benefits, payroll, risk and compliance, and more.

ExtensisHR, for instance, helps SMBs festively and functionally celebrate the holidays by providing:

• HR support, including assistance with creating and updating holiday policies, learning and development initiatives, employee recognition programs, and more.
• Time and labor management, helping busy employers easily control schedules, attendance, overtime, timecards, and more.
• Payroll administration, with access to a dedicated payroll specialist assisting with payroll processing, tax filing, reporting, and more.
• Full-cycle recruiting solutions, including everything from job advertisement creation to offer letter consultations, available at no additional cost with our PEO solution.

Temperatures may fall during the holidays, but your business’s productivity doesn’t have to. Explore ExtensisHR’s PEO solution, or contact us today to learn how we can help you operate smoothly year-round and give everyone the rest and recognition they deserve.