Holidays as a small business owner can be complicated, right?
Some of us are facing the busiest part of the year and have to hustle to meet our financial goals. Others of us experience a slowdown that we may or may not have been expecting.
Whether you’re on one side of the hustle spectrum or the other, my guess is that you want to enjoy the upcoming holiday weeks. I know I do.
During my first few years in business, I worked throughout the holidays. I didn’t feel like I had another option. Some of my clients were also working, and I felt like I should be available to them (even though they had never asked for that!).
As I’ve developed my perspectives on Humans First, Workers Second, I’ve tried to apply this framework to how I handle holidays.
Here’s a peek behind the scenes at Stratos:
- We “close” our office between Christmas and New Year. We let our clients know ahead of time that our responses will be slow during that week.
- If employees want to use PTO to have the week fully off, we encourage that!
- Employees who don’t want to use PTO can complete their hours on time and schedule.
We started doing this two years ago to honor our team’s needs. If they wanted to stay busy with work, they could. If they wanted to enjoy their holidays, they could, too.
Your holiday plans will look different than ours, but here are the questions I’d recommend thinking through:
- When are my family or friend commitments? Put them on your calendar so you can prioritize them.
- When will I take time to rest during the holidays? (Notice, this doesn’t say, “Should I take time to rest?” You should! You deserve it. Now, plan a time for rest.)
- Do I need to finish some work, or can it wait until the New Year? Alternatively, if I do XYZ this week, will it ease the workload during the first few weeks of the new year? You get to decide what work looks like for you during the holidays. I recommend taking the week off of work, but depending on your load, it may be great to accomplish some of your back office work so you don’t have it hanging over your head in the new year.
Whatever you do, be a human first and a worker second, especially around the holidays. You deserve it.
In the meantime, happy holidays from our crew to yours!
Julia