The holiday season is officially upon us. It’s the time of year for family, friends, and eating copious amounts of food. However, if your team doesn’t plan ahead, the pumpkin pie might not taste as sweet.
The holiday season can be a busy time, so it’s important for your team to prepare. Here are four ways your team can best plan for your time away from the office and ensure you get the holiday rest you deserve.
1. Get organized
A simple and effective measure your team can take to prepare for the holiday season is to make sure you are organized for your time off.
Making a to-do list is the first step to ensuring that your team avoids chaos upon your return to the office. The sooner you make a list, the faster you can check it off and start preparing for your holiday.
It is also important to tie up any loose ends before you go away. This includes responding to unanswering emails, returning phone calls, and even tidying up your workspace.
Your team will likely be greeted by an awash of emails and phone calls when you come back, so getting on top of any unfinished tasks is vital for a successful work environment.
2. Automate as much work as possible
Automating your team’s workflow before you leave for the holidays goes beyond creating a detailed away message for your email account. Using GAIN, your team can prepare your content in advance and automate the publishing while you are away.
GAIN allows your team to edit, manage, and schedule all of your content in one place. Pixel-perfect previews of content make it easy for clients to view and make changes to any posts in advance, which makes for a faster turnaround during that pre-holiday push.
Furthermore, the GAIN content calendar and labeling features allow your team to schedule your campaigns and marketing efforts throughout the holiday period. Your entire team can also view content on all their devices, granting for easy access away from the desk.
Automating your workflow as much as possible before the holidays can give your team peace of mind knowing that content is scheduled throughout their time off.
3. Get your team working together
The holiday season means that different team members will be away at overlapping times. Even with a smaller workforce, it is paramount that your workflow remains prosperous.
Training staff in other positions can help tackle this problem. Multifaceted team members ensure that when one, or two employees, are out of the office, someone can step into their role immediately and effectively.
Furthermore, your team should be encouraged to work together to to delegate the absentee’s workload throughout their department effectively.
A tactful plan which permits other team members to carry out tasks for a missing employee, such as replying to their emails, will help reduce the risks of a bottleneck and ensure productivity doesn’t drop off.
4. Have a plan of action for your return
Teams often make the mistake of only ensuring their loose ends are tied up before they go away.
However, it is equally important to prepare an ‘action plan’ for when everyone returns to work.
When you arrive back, the likelihood is that your team will be greeted with a bulging inbox and countless messages. How will you prioritize these tasks alongside the rest of your workload?
Before you leave for the holidays, consider what your priorities and goals are. Then, your team can use tools like GAIN to automate your content for the first few days you are scheduled to return to the office so your workload isn’t so overwhelming.
Keep these productivity tips in mind while your team is preparing for the holiday season and the transition back to work once the holidays are over will be seamless and chaos-free.
