Working the Holidays?

Planning for Holiday Time…

Should you ask your team to work over the holidays? Holiday time often becomes extra time to work on projects… but is it better to give everyone some holiday downtime?

Reality...

Most teams plan for slack time during a project. Everyone starts a plan with some extra time in the plan, but it is usually consumed well before the project is complete. People don’t build enough contingency time into their plans for many reasons including chronic underestimating, business or management pressure, or disbelief of how long it takes to do things.

Since there is always pressure to get things done, there is always pressure to work extra hours each day, weekends, and then finally holiday time. I have worked on Thanksgiving, during unpaid time off, months of 100 hour weeks, and have seen large engineering teams on mandatory 60 hour weeks for well over a year. 

I believe that the year end holidays are the limit and that with a well led team, the time taken off will be quickly recovered through team performance. That payback might be added time spent in early January or in efficiency from a better attitude about the project.

Good Practice…

The company where I learned the expression for intense activity “running around with your hair on fire” actually has one of the better practices. They suspend all changes to their online product for the holiday season and make space for everyone to take time off. The rest of the year these folks live in a 24x7 world, I’m sure the employees need and appreciate the space.

Many companies that are aggressive about work and schedules loosen up at the holidays. I believe if you have the right motivation for the project team to understand and believe in the importance of the project, you can allow some discretion for the team during the holidays. If you do not have that project ownership by the team, setting the boundaries for holiday vacation gets real complicated.

What if it's crunch time…

At one place I worked the critical trade show of the year usually started on Super Bowl Sunday. Since we scheduled product announcements and releases around that most-critical show, the chances were good that the holidays would be new-product crunch time. Further complications included December shipment deadlines which led to production support that also took engineering resources.

The team worked the problems together. They understood the need, believed in the product, and understood that management did care about them. A lot of the attitude about taking care of the people was set by the founder years before I arrived, but the tone of the company got us through those crunch times and assured successful trade shows. The leadership knowing when to push and knowing when to give the team some space made the difference.