After a year of working hard, many employees are looking forward to their yearly summer holiday. This holiday is the well-deserved break they have earned through their hard work: a few weeks away from the office and the chance to rest, relax and focus their minds on completely non-work related matters.

Sounds great, and if planned well, this holiday period should be relaxing indeed. But there is a big if in that sentence. Because in any serious organization the summer holiday period requires proper planning to ensure that the hard work and progress that the team has made during the year are not messed up during the summer break. A few challenges:

• Depending on the industry you are in, your customers may need you less during the summer or they may actually need you more (like in the aviation industry).
• If you have some young parents in your team, they may all prefer the same weeks for their annual leave, as they may want their leave coincide with the school holidays of their children.
• To make sure that work can continue while some key people are on leave, some extra time around holidays is needed for hand-over and knowledge transfer.
• If your company has certain policies to ensure fairness in approval of holiday requests, these must be taken into account while making decisions. And the rules may be such that last year’s decisions influence possibilities for this year.
• Unless the nature of the duties of your team is such that everyone can do everything, you have to consider the mix of skills available in the team at work at any point in time.

All of the above aspects, and typically a few more, have to be taken into account around holiday planning. If you don’t get the solution to this puzzle right, the holiday period may result in stress for your team members (and in particular for the planners), and lead to unsatisfied customers. And if stressed colleagues and unhappy customers are what your team members find when they return from their annual leave, then for them the relaxed holiday feeling will be rapidly wiped from their memories as well.

Holiday planning is not an easy puzzle, and solving it requires giving it the right attention in your planning processes and supporting tools.