Managers Part XV - The Holidays

When you're in management the holidays can be a joyful time, or they can be hell, it all depends on the kind of business that you're in. My last job before retiring I worked in an office for a government agency and got holidays (and weekends) off; the nature of the work was such that holidays aren't any busier than any other time of year. However, for almost two decades I worked in a retail grocery store—every holiday is busy when you work in a grocery store. In general it can be more than twice as busy as a normal week in the days leading up to a holiday, but no matter how clearly you communicate, there will always be people who want to take off during the busiest times. There are several types of managers, each handling the situation differently:

1. The "nice guys" who approve every time-off request. These are the managers who don't know how to say no and find that instead of "all hands on deck" they are actually shorthanded when they can least afford it. While the people who take off believe that these are "good" managers, somebody still has to work, and there is much irritation and low morale with those who get stuck working. 
2. The managers who believe that seniority or position entitles them to take off and leave the work to subordinates.  When the holiday, Christmas Eve, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July etc. comes up, the managers and senior (i.e. most experienced) people all take off, leaving the store at its busiest to assistants, newbies and high school kids.
3. Some managers make no changes at all. In the company that I worked for, there were stores where there were no extra people scheduled on the day before Thanksgiving (one of the top three busiest days of the year) and no senior management in the store past 6:00PM, their normal quitting time. 
4. Those who demand "all hands on deck" and work the busy shifts themselves. No vacations, nobody leaves early, especially the managers.

I was always a Type 4 manager. I learned this gradually. My first holiday season as an Assistant Store Director I was usually scheduled until 5:00PM, but couldn't ever leave on time and ended up working 13-14 hour days due to poor planning. My boss was a Type 1 manager, so a lot of the work fell on a select few of us who were serious about getting the store in tip-top shape. I was able to fully put my Type 4 management plan into shape after getting transferred to another store where the store director was open to changing things up for holiday scheduling. Managers were required to work at least a half day on their weekend day off leading up to a holiday and were required to work later shifts. No one got the day before the holiday off or the holiday itself, depending on which as the busiest day. No vacations were approved during the busy times. We would allow occasional exceptions for employees who had unique situations, but it was definitely an exception and not the rule. The Store Director and I, however, scheduled ourselves for weekend and late night shifts, putting ourselves in the same boat as everyone else. Of course, not everyone liked this method of scheduling: one manager ended up getting fired because she took out her frustration at not getting the week of December 22nd-January 4th off at other employees, verbally abusing them until we had to let her go. Occasionally employees would seek transfers to other stores so that they could take half of the month of December off. 

As a retail manager, I didn't necessarily enjoy having to work every holiday, but I understood that it was part of the job, and didn't allow subordinates to act as if they didn't work in retail. One of the jobs of a manager is to communicate the expectations to his or her subordinates and require compliance with those expectations. Jobs, despite what some politicians believe, do not exist because business owners altruistically want to provide a living to those in the community; they exist because there is a need for people to carry out specific tasks at a specific place and a specific time; and there's more of those tasks at certain times. It is understandable that an employee would want to put family gatherings or personal needs first, but if that means that the job for which they were hired goes undone, perhaps they are in the wrong business. 

Update post pandemic:
The pandemic changed a lot of things, it certainly changed the employer to employee dynamic and power balance. The pandemic hit right after several years of historically low unemployment. Many people in food service and retail industries began getting better at setting boundaries and speaking up themselves. This was a good thing. But it was also a bad thing. Many employees refused to do what they were hired to do, and managers often were afraid to fire bad employees due to the difficulty in replacing them. Employees often became adamant that they wouldn't request time off, but were simply informing their employer that they would be gone during certain times, whether it was the busy season or not. I maintain that if there are busy seasons, and this is made clear upon hiring, employees should stick with what they agreed to do when they were hired. 

Start at the beginning: Part I

Go to: Part XVI