John Jonas shares how to manage virtual assistants' time off without disrupting work, especially with Philippines-based teams. His approach: give the week between Christmas and New Year's off, have developers monitor email for emergencies, create a holiday calendar with blackout dates, and rotate coverage for support teams. Start scheduling conversations early and confirm time zones.
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Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. This is episode 212, having your OFS work over the Holidays. So last time I talked about Halloween and how I don't like Halloween. What I do like is the time period from Thanksgiving or late November to New Year's Day. Everyone is nicer, people are giving. The world is a more enjoyable place when people are looking to help each other. It's just a really, really great time, at least in my culture. So I know that it's way early, but I still want to talk about the holidays just so people are prepared for it. So at onlinejobs ph, we give all of our workers the holidays off. We basically give them unlimited time off at the holidays and it's all paid. So we always give the week between Christmas Eve and New Year's Day off. We also ask all of our people to check their email in case something urgent happens. And specifically we ask our developers that to make sure the website doesn't go down. Now we don't really have urgent tasks in our business and so there's not, there's not like it's not a critical time for us. But I know for a lot of you for like E commerce or drop shipping or freight businesses, this is like a critical time. And you may have even hired seasonal help during this time. So let's kind of talk about the holidays. So first of all, in the Philippines, there's a lot of holidays at the end of the year, starting at the beginning of November, although it really picks up at the end of November when there's a holiday basically every week. And then there's lots of holidays at the end of December. So what can you do to ensure that things are covered in your business over this time? Well, so one of the things you can do is create a, a holiday calendar where you can mark specifically the days that they cannot take their paid time off. And if you want to mark like all of December that they can't take paid time off during that time because it's too critical to you, go ahead. Then you just need to let them know that they can take time off outside of that. And it would probably be a really good thing to have a conversation with them about it and probably to have that conversation early. If your ofs are working on a schedule when you mark those days that they can't take off, try and do it with a try and let them know the time zone also so that you don't get mistakes in miss shifts. So something that call centers in the Philippines do is they alternate holidays so they'll let one set of people have Christmas Eve and Christmas off and they'll let another set of people have New Year's Eve and New Year's off. Where in the Philippines, New Year's is at least as big as Christmas. Maybe it's probably bigger. On our team, the only people that we don't let completely have off for from Christmas Eve to New Year's are our support team. Now, usually we double cover all of our shifts and so at that time we let people take half shifts so that there's really just one person covering it. And we may miss a couple hours here and there, but we let them kind of figure out when they want to work, when they want to cover it with each other so that they can. If someone really needs specific time off, maybe someone else doesn't need that and they can work that out together. And then with our less urgent teams like development or design or social media, whatever, we let all projects stop during the holidays so that there's no pressure to continue working. We just want to make sure the website is still up. So there are not really any rules or standard practices here. It's just kind of whatever you want to do. What works for you and your business, if it works for you to let them have the week of Christmas Eve to New Year's Day off, great, go for it. For me, I don't want to work during that time and so I'm really happy that I can give them that time off. But if you need them, like your busiest time is December 15th to December 28th, it's perfectly acceptable to say, hey, look, you cannot take time off during these days. And just because we give the time off doesn't mean you have to. I would love to hear how you handle the holidays. If you have things that you've done specifically, I'd love to hear it. Send me an email. JohnLineJobs phone. It.
