How are you handling attendance policies without burning out your leadership team?

Coming from the corporate world, I was inundated with useless meetings that bogged down my calendar and took away from my mental bandwidth to focus on revenue generating projects. So once I started my business and got a crew going, I've been a lot more mindful of how often I do team meetings and 1-1s. Right now we've been doing 1-1s every 2-3 months, and one overall team meeting every other month. I'm still in constant contact with my crew so I still have a pulse on what's happening but I can foresee I will need to up my cadence as my Team continues to grow.

we use a simplified request time off logger/tracker that asks what days the user is requesting and what reason, this will auto trigger an acknowledgment of point accumulation statement where they can e-sign and leave a paper trail for us to keep on our records. Makes it way easier when an employee can visually see "ok ive used "x" amount of time off or ive asked for "x" amount of days.

Hi Rose, we've sort of gone the other way. We are extremely flexible. We let our employees block off times and dates in their own Jobber calendar.

They can take as much time as they want off. They can work half days, for all I care.

Now, this goes the other way as well. This summer, we were incredibly busy. My core team did not want any overtime, unfortunately, so I ended up hiring four additional employees, and we were using two to three sub crews throughout the summer. Now it's September, and things are slowing down a little bit, and unfortunately, it looks like there are fewer hours for everyone. This will be our next hurdle, and we're going to have to figure things out as we go here.

What I have tried to realize is that the schedule in construction is never going to be perfect. It does seem like it's almost a full-time role for someone to be dealing with that beast. There were times this summer where I just had to chill out, stare at that calendar, and make magic happen, honestly.

I don't know if that answered your question, but it was just something we've been dealing with this summer that was relating to your question.

My current strategy is to be as flexible as possible up front, but track who is consistently calling out/late etc. Then energy gets devoted to having meetings with them and figuring out what is going on. My thought is that you'll always have someone occasionally game the system regardless of the system in place, but you'll find out quickly who is looking to take consistent advantage of you by looking at the patterns. It's kind of like how Amazon will almost always refund your order if you claim it was lost or stolen. But if you make this claim once a month, they just shut down your account.

I think an earned time-off system could help too. Employees could accrue time based on hours worked until they have enough for a full day off. I also think cross-training is important. More than one person should know how to do each job so when someone is out, the work can still get done. Flexibility is important, but the business still has to operate.