Insight from an HR consultant in Edinburgh on keeping your business running smoothly when half your team is on holiday.
If you run a small business, summer can quietly become one of your most disruptive periods.
Two people off at the same time in a team of ten means you’ve lost 20% of your capacity. That’s a fifth of your workforce, gone.
Most business owners don’t plan for it until they’re already feeling the squeeze.
The good news is that a little preparation now can save you a lot of stress later. Let me walk you through what that looks like in practice.
Why summer absence hits small businesses so hard
In a larger organisation, holiday cover tends to absorb itself across departments. There are enough people around to pick up the slack without anyone really noticing.
But in a smaller team, every person carries a bigger share of the work. When two of them are away at the same time, the impact is immediate. Deadlines get tighter. Response times slow down. The people left behind are suddenly doing their own job plus someone else’s.
And if you haven’t thought about who covers what before the holidays start, you’ll find yourself firefighting rather than running your business.
Work out who owns what before anyone goes anywhere
The first thing to do is sit down and map out the key responsibilities across your team. For each person who’s going on leave, think about what falls under their remit and what happens to it while they’re away.
Some helpful questions to ask yourself:
- Which tasks genuinely can’t wait for two or three weeks?
- What could be paused or simplified until they’re back?
- Is there someone else in the team who could step in for the essentials?
If you discover that nobody else can cover a critical function, that’s a signal worth paying attention to. It doesn’t need a complicated fix. A simple handover document, a quick walkthrough with a colleague, or a shared folder with the right information can make all the difference.
And if the gap is too wide to bridge internally, bringing in temporary support is a sensible option to consider.
Look after the people who are still at their desks
This is the bit that often gets missed. And it’s frequently where September resignations come from.
When the team is short-staffed, the people who are in tend to just crack on with things. They don’t complain. They absorb the extra load. But covering for absent colleagues for weeks on end is a lot to ask, especially if nobody acknowledges it.
Here are a few things that genuinely make a difference:
- Say thank you. Tell your team directly that you know it’s been busier and that you appreciate the effort. It takes a couple of minutes and it really matters.
- Decide in advance what’s allowed to slip. If everything stays at the same priority level, people will stretch themselves too thin trying to keep all the plates spinning.
- Reduce meetings and strip back non-essential tasks during peak holiday weeks. If something can wait until the full team is back, let it wait.
- Check in with people during the busy period, not just afterwards.
These are small actions. But they send a clear message that you see what your team is doing and you value it.
Let your clients know early
If your capacity is going to be reduced over the summer, tell your clients before it becomes a problem.
Most clients are perfectly understanding when you give them a heads-up in advance. They can adjust their own timelines and expectations. What they don’t respond well to is finding out after a deadline has been missed or a response has been delayed without explanation.
A short email or a quick conversation ahead of time goes a long way. It protects your relationships and your reputation.
Treat it as a useful test of your team structure
Summer holidays can actually reveal something really valuable about how your business operates.
If one person being away causes significant disruption, that tells you something important. It highlights where your single points of failure sit. It shows you which processes only work because one individual runs them, and where knowledge is too concentrated in one pair of hands.
Rather than seeing that as a problem, see it as useful information. You can use it to shape how you structure roles and share knowledge going forward, so that your business becomes more resilient over time.
How HR consultancy services in Edinburgh can help
As an HR consultant, I work with small business owners on exactly this kind of planning. I can help you to map out your team’s dependencies, put straightforward handover structures in place, and make sure cover arrangements are sorted before the busy period hits.
Just as importantly, I can help you think about how to support the team members who are holding everything together while others are away. Getting that right means you’re far less likely to face a retention problem when everyone returns in September.
Let’s have a conversation
If any of this has resonated with you, I’d love to chat.
As an outsourced HR consultant in Edinburgh, I help business owners prepare for the practical, people-related challenges that come with running a small team.
There’s no obligation and no pressure. Just a friendly conversation about where you are and what support might be useful.
Get in touch to book a discovery call and let’s make sure your summer runs smoothly.
