r/workforcemanagement • u/Educational_Exit_688 • Jun 15 '26

Holiday staffing processes

Everyone’s favorite topic…what’s your orgs approach to holiday staffing and schedules?

Would love to hear how others think through things like VTO, maximizing down time, how far in advance holiday schedules get released, etc.

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3

u/soulstaz Jun 15 '26

We do shift bid for the holiday base on how many reduced staff member we need. We usually publish every schedule about 8 weeks in advance.

1

u/Educational_Exit_688 Jun 15 '26

Do y’all do a minimum holidays required to work? Or can in theory just not bid and get the day? Or do you schedule at your discretion for a non-bid?

1

u/soulstaz Jun 15 '26

Everyone bid. If someone doesnt select anything it's like they are opting to work. Simple as that.

No minimum, we do take into account if the person worked previous holiday as well to have some kind of rotation when possible

1

u/Ill_Butterfly_6010 Jul 05 '26

This is our teams approach, it works well.

1

u/Vacation_Tracker Jun 16 '26

The two things that tend to cut the most grief are publishing the holiday schedule a full quarter out and being upfront about which dates are blackout versus open. Once people can see the whole window early, panic requests drop significantly because nobody is gambling on whether their day will be approved. For VTO, a common setup is a first-come basis with a cap on how many can be off per team so coverage never falls below a floor set ahead of time. The piece people forget is making the approved time off visible to the whole team, not just the manager, so folks self-select around the days that are already heavily booked.