Watch Out for Seasonal Silliness Around the Holiday

Down in Texas, just like everywhere else in the United States, there are quite a few holidays that bring the silliness out in people — reasons to drink, celebrate with friends, set off fireworks, and generally get a little rowdy and obnoxious.

While Christmas may be called the “silly season,” every manager knows he or she has to be prepared for similar silliness during:

-Super Bowl Sunday

-St. Patrick’s Day

-Cinco De Mayo

-Memorial Day

-Fourth of July

-Labor Day

-High school football championships (this is huge in Texas!)

-Halloween

Beware of Sunday and Monday holidays or three-day weekends, because people invariably call in “sick” the next day. Or if it’s a Friday holiday — or a three-day weekend — people will be itching to get out the door on a Thursday.

And if it’s a middle-of-the-week holiday — Fourth of July was on Thursday this year — you’re going to get a lot of vacation requests for that week, or at the very least a lot of suddenly-sick people on the day before and the day after.

So how do you prevent seasonal silliness?

First, just accept that it’s going to happen. You can’t control people’s thoughts or desires. If they want to risk blowing off their fingers for some St. Patrick’s Day fireworks (don’t ask), nothing you say can stop them.

But what you can control is safety and productivity

For starters, since safety is a non-negotiable, that means no cutting loose or horseplay at work. No lunchtime fireworks, no drinking at lunch, and so forth. Everyone still needs to treat the workplace as a workplace. 

That also means everyone needs to stay productive and continue to do their work. If you’re already measuring people’s productivity, it will help to remind them before the holiday that you still expect people to meet their rates and stay just as productive as they were in previous weeks.

This is how we continued to maintain our productivity at Robroy — we were measuring everyone and everything, and we expected people to maintain their rates every day that they worked, no matter what day it was.

Generally, what will happen on long weekends and around the holidays, productivity will ultimately drop. So you need to remind people to keep up their work levels, no matter what day it is.

No Vacation Days

Another thing I did was to make a company policy that didn’t allow people to take vacation. If they were due a vacation, and had earned it, they had to take it a week at a time. They couldn’t take a single day off unless it was an emergency, like having a sick child or parent.

Otherwise, we would end up having to overstaff for the post-holiday Mondays. If 10 – 15% of your workforce is going to take an extra day on Monday, you have to staff up for that. Whether you’re dealing with hangovers or people turning a 3-day weekend into a 4-day, you have to get a lot more people to fill in and keep the office productivity up.

Ultimately, the only way to stop seasonal silliness is to make your philosophy part of the hiring and induction process and to make it clear that everyone is here to serve the customers, not any one individual’s needs. 

Of course, this requires a degree of discipline on behalf of the managers. Even the CEO can’t be seen taking long golf weekends and flying around in company jets or first class while your salespeople are forced to slog it out in economy class or your associates miss out on an extra day of vacation.

If you want your people to follow the rules and policies, that needs to happen from the top down. The executives can’t act like the rules don’t apply to them. If you have a “no vacation days” policy, then it has to apply to everyone. If you measure productivity for everyone on the floor, your management team has to have their own measurement metrics to meet.

I’ve been a manufacturing executive, as well as a sales and marketing professional, for a few decades. Now I help companies turn around their own business, including pivoting within their industry. If you would like more information, please contact me:

[email protected].