How do you handle coverage when employees are out on vacation?

We’re dealing with this right now.

Our best employee is moving out of state, which already puts us in a transition period.

At the same time, 2 of our employees are taking vacation, so we’re going to be under capacity for the next few days.

That means my wife and I are picking up the slack.

And realistically, it’s going to be some very long days of scoops.

This is one of those parts of running a route-based business that doesn’t get talked about enough.

When everything is fully staffed, the schedule looks fine.

Then one person leaves, someone gets sick, someone has PTO, the weather throws things off, or a route runs long, and suddenly you realize how thin the operation actually is.

I don’t blame employees for taking time off. People need vacations. They have families, lives, and things outside of work.

But as the owner, you still have to figure out how to protect the customer experience when capacity drops.

A few things I’m thinking through right now:

• how much extra capacity should we have built into the schedule?
• when should we stop accepting new jobs temporarily?
• when does it make sense for owners to jump back in?
• how much notice should we require for vacation requests?
• should we cross-train more people across routes?
• how do we avoid burning out the rest of the team when someone is gone?

The hard part is that smaller service businesses usually do not have a deep bench.

One or 2 people being gone can completely change the week.

This is also making me think more seriously about building routes and hiring plans around capacity gaps, not just normal weeks.

Because normal weeks are easy to plan for.

The stressful weeks expose the weak spots.

When employees are on vacation or you’re temporarily short-staffed, do you:

- reschedule customers?

- have owners cover the work?

- limit new jobs?

- bring in part-time help?

- build extra capacity into the schedule year-round?

- something else?