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Making Cents of the Holiday Season

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While the holiday season is viewed by most retail businesses as the “most wonderful time of the year” for sales, this is not true for a significant number of other types of businesses. The problem with the holiday season is that employees tend to shift their focus away from working, and more to thinking about holiday cheer. However, you as the business owner, or manager, do have some alternatives to ensure your firm continues to run efficiently and productively during this time. 

Unfortunately, for business owners, the last two weeks of December are the most inefficient and unproductive time of the entire year. During the week before Christmas Day, most employees are focused on getting ready for the holidays, or planning their outings and social events. No matter how hard you “crack the whip,” employees inevitably focus on seasonal activities. 

While you have the option of just living with these inefficiencies, there are some management techniques you can implement in order to lessen the impact, or take advantage of, the holiday season. 

One of the easiest ways to manage the holiday season is to have employees take their holidays during this time period. While not all will want to do so, employees with young families, those who travel to be with their family or friends, or those who have family visiting, will likely see this as a positive move on your part. They get time off with their family, and you get them to burn up their holidays during the most unproductive time of year. This is the definition of a win-win situation. 

Another method of making this time of year more productive is to set aside a day or afternoon, usually a Friday, when the whole company can get together and decorate the office, have a social get together during work hours and maybe enjoy an evening out with spouses. This will help to eliminate the naysayers who like to point out how cheap the company is, and will allow you to acknowledge that the holiday season is here. If employees know that there is a day set aside for holiday cheer, they will not be as likely to waste time during the rest of the holiday season. 

You may also want to allow employees to take a half day or whole day off so they can do holiday shopping or other holidays tasks. This will help to eliminate their fixation with leaving early, staying out late for lunch, or spending time on the internet or telephone shopping or holiday planning. I would even go so far as to give them that time off with pay. If you don’t, they are going to waste the time during the weeks leading up to the holiday season anyway.
 
Of course, you can always go the route of completely closing the business down during this time. This is an especially good strategy if business is slow throughout the holiday season, or if your employees have accumulated holidays which they have not taken. The only word of caution is to ensure that emergency contact names and numbers are left on your website, voice mail and front door.

An additional option is to shift employee’s jobs to less demanding tasks such as counting inventory, cleaning up computer and email files, sorting paper files or just reorganizing the office. With less business coming in during this period, the employees will have extra time and your job will be to keep them busy.

Don’t forget to send employees out to see customers, suppliers and contacts. Remember to send a small gift, such as candy or festive foods which can be enjoyed by all. In other words, be careful not to alienate the people such as accounts payable, finance and shipping - those people who are behind the scenes but may control your orders or cheques.

Finally, if you want to ensure that your business doesn’t suffer over the holiday season and you can’t bring yourself to undertake any of the suggestions previously noted, you might want to start selling gift certificates or find some other method of increasing sales. 

Failing that, you might as well just admit that this is the season to be jolly and join in the fun! 


-Myron Gordon owns TMSG Management Services Group, which provides management and financial services to growing businesses. 




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