In demand holiday periods how do you handle them?

It seems that these days we think and talk about the Xmas and New Year festive period earlier & earlier on in the year. For many it is their favorite holiday of the year. I used to be the Grinch myself but having two kids has changed me, and there’s something special about the weather cooling off, twinkling lights and mistletoe hung, and happy music playing everywhere.

However a proactive workforce management team has already been planning around this period for months already, as well as thinking about other important festive periods if relevant to their employees such as such as Ramadan, Diwali, Thanksgiving, Lunar New Year. The list is endless and is very personal to a particular operations demographic makeup.

A question & discussion raised in the WFManagement Telegram Messenger Group previously was around how the period of between 16th December to the 5th January was being handled from a workforce planning and scheduling perspective. In most contact centres this period is a highly sought after holiday period for agents. It is also often a period of high customer demand for many organisations (especially in the retail space) & thus not always possible to give everyone the time off they want.

Here are some ideas that bounced around the Telegram Messenger group on this topic.

Our aim is to decline no one. At a minimum offer a counter offer / second preference. We block out self service planned leave for these dates and call for Expression of interest (EOI’s). We have clear dates and great comms to keep our agents engaged and aware of what point we’re at. We start this in June with responses due in July. Forecast for the period is assessed, actual requirements articulated, seasonality (storm season) plays a big role for our centre, plus we need resources for multiple channels so need to make allowances for that work too as our system struggles so it’s manual (social media, email, portal work, ece work). Then we look at who has volunteered for previous public holiday work, who has had Easter or Christmas leave most recently, if people have the leave available etc. We also do a second review in October / November to review our forecast and resource needs. We do another review in December based on the weather forecast and staffing situation at the time (could have attrition or recruitment since June). All decisions are run via Leaders before advising their staff of the success of their EOI. We do this for Christmas and Easter every year.

It’s a 3 phase approach for us. Release 1 happened in August 2018. We offer this slightly below our standard vacation shrinkage. We have just completed Release 2 just now where we increased our BAU shrinkage. We will then do a 3rd release about 9-10 weeks prior to the event where we will have a clearer idea of our demand and will look to offer as much time off as possible to try and balance our demand needs with keeping people happy. We are also building a new step in this year where we will target those who applied in release 2 and were unsuccessful before we fully do release 3. From an employee engagement point of view this appears to be going down well however because this festive leave is so emotive, no matter what approach you take there will always be people that aren’t happy unfortunately. A release over time limits risk, minimizes disappointed i.e. you always have another chance, whilst also creating a black friday feeling of get it whilst you can.