Encouraging your employees to take staff holidays

It’ll soon be summer and people up and down the country will be planning their “staycation” or even a short trip abroad, using staff holidays. 

It’s not just during the summer months that staff should look to take time off from the working environment, because a little break here or there has multiple benefits, and is known to improve people’s long term working outlook. 

Any member of staff that works five days a week is entitled to 28 days paid leave each year, but for one reason or another, many don’t take anywhere near their full allowance.

 

So, what are the benefits of staff holidays? 

 

• Relieves stress – A break can improve productivity and help to reduce stress – and we’re all entitled to a rest every now and then.  

 

• Helps lower staff turnover – If staff feel like they can’t take a holiday then it may prompt them to consider a change of job or just leave. A culture that helps and encourages “leave” is always helpful and noted by employees. 

 

• Prevents staff holiday traffic – If your culture encourages and helps plan for staff holidays, then it’s unlikely that you’ll get large numbers of staff requesting time off on similar dates. Also, if your staff aren’t encouraged to take time off, when it comes to the end of the year, you might have the unenviable task of trying to juggle a lot of leave requests at once. 

 

How to help encourage staff holidays

 

• Provide reminders – Remind staff just how important breaks are and make staff holidays part of the organisational culture. 

 

• Talk openly – Plan meetings to talk about staff wellbeing and mention the benefits of taking a staff holiday. You’d be surprised, some might not know. 

 

• Make taking a holiday easier – Create a system that makes it easy for staff to book in what time they need. Send regular email reminders with links to the system complete with user and login details. 

 

• Introduce a holiday policy – This will explain the steps required to take a holiday and the process in place. This should be easily accessible on the intranet or via the HR team. 

 

• Outline where leave isn’t appropriate – For example Christmas Day and bank holidays if appropriate. Mark clearly for staff so there’s no confusion on the matter. 

 

There are other ways to reward staff too.  Whether you’re looking for reward schemes, staff incentives, or employee benefits, do it with Asda for business and you get to give more than a gift. They can choose anything they want from thousands of products in over 600 stores and anything online at George.com.

Give them a gift that gets them anything – from weekly shops to weekend home makeover essentials. Give them an Asda for Business gift card. And if you want to speed things up with an e-gift card, these are now compatible with Apple and Google wallets making shopping even easier.