Going on annual leave is a necessity when trying to maintain a good work life balance. Not only does it help you from a mental stand -point, it also benefits your work as you have a fresh mind and body in which to excel at your job.
However, we all understand the fear of coming back to work with 1000 unread emails and 100 voicemails awaiting us. For some people this can play on their mind before they head off on annual leave. Below I have given my top pre-holiday work tips that can potentially help you avoid this situation.
- Out of Office
It is very important to have a detailed Out of Office as it means that any urgent queries can be dealt with in your absence and your clients/customers will know who to get in touch with. This ensures that there should be no fires to put out when you come back to the office.
- Voicemail
Following on from the same theme as the Out Of Office, an updated voicemail is very important. Outlining the days, you are gone from the office and when you are back and also giving the name and number of a colleague that will pick your work up will solve a lot of problems. There is nothing worse than ringing through to someone who has an outdated voicemail or one with little or no detail.
- Detailed Handover
Depending on the type of job you work in this may be straight forward or very complicated. My tip would be to ensure that your handover is very detailed and that you cover all areas of your work from top to bottom and remember that everyone works in a different way and that something you might think is obvious may not be to someone else
- Tell Clients/Customer’s
For people in Client/Customer focused roles it is important to give people the heads up that you are going away and ideally introduce the person they will be dealing with. This helps to avoid any confusion or anger when they ring the office and find out that their contact is away for 2 weeks. It also means that the person has another connection in the business for times when you are out of the office throughout the year and that they feel like they are getting the best service.
- Support Colleague
One of the most important things is to identify someone within the business that you trust to look after your work and who is confident enough to handle any issues that arise. What you don’t want to happen is for the client/customer to feel like they are not being serviced correctly and for the relationship to be soured when you get back. If it is someone who you can trust they can also cover up any of the inevitable mistakes that we all make and keep them out of sight of your boss!
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