My business partner, Dan, and I let our team take paid time off over the holidays and unlimited leave because our business doesn’t have many time-sensitive tasks.
This system works for us, but I know many businesses where this arrangement won’t work at all.
Holidays are some of the busiest times for dropshipping, e-commerce, and freight businesses. Some of you might have hired seasonal workers to cover that extra work.
The problem is that in the Philippines, most holidays are at the end of the year. Starting at the end of November, there’s a holiday practically every week.
Due to this, many of your Filipino workers may request to take their days off during this period. It’s in their culture; they’re socially pressured to spend time with their families.
This creates a problem because you’re left without your Filipino VA just when you need them the most.
So, what can you do to ensure your business is covered even during the holidays? Here are some things you can do:
1. You can create a “leave” calendar where you mark the days they CAN’T take their leave. Let your OFS know they can take their leave on any other day except those days. Label the calendar with the correct time zone to avoid missed work schedules.
2. One thing call centers do in the Philippines is alternate holiday scheduling. Half the team can take Christmas Eve and Christmas off, and the other half can take New Year’s Eve and New Year’s off. It’s not a perfect solution, but it ensures that people are working and your team can still enjoy the holidays.
3. For our customer support team, we offer half shifts during the holidays. Instead of 8 hours, they only do 4 hours on those days. We usually have two people per 8-hour shift, so they discuss amongst themselves which hours they will cover. This way, there’s always someone online for email support.
4. Our dev team and site administrator don’t work on any new projects during the holidays, but are on call and monitoring to ensure the websites are working properly.
5. Last but not least, encourage your VA to talk about this with their families. Even in the Philippines, so many people work over the holidays. But sometimes, a Filipino VA’s family may not take their job seriously because they’re working from home. Making it clear to their loved ones that their online work is a real job would make their families more respectful of their time and schedule. So, when the time comes that they need to work on a holiday, their family will understand and not pressure them to stop working.
There are no rules or standard practices here. It’s whatever you want to do with your business. Just because we give everyone Dec 24 – Jan 2 off, doesn’t mean you need to.
Do you have other ways of covering holiday shifts with your OFS? Email me at john@onlinejobs.ph.
John