Holiday coverage without a lottery

The asks are already forming

Someone's daughter has booked a flight for the week of Christmas. Someone else has had New Year's Eve off four years running and would like a fifth. Someone is quietly counting on Thanksgiving morning, because that's when their family does the meal.

None of it has been said out loud, because it's August. It arrives all at once in November, and by then a good deal of it has been settled by who got to you first.

A rotation people can see coming

If someone worked Christmas last year, they don't work it this year. That's the whole rule, and it only works if last year is written down somewhere you can find it.

If it isn't written down, this is the year you start. Name, holiday, year, one row each. It's a small job every December and it makes every December after this one easier.

A draw is fair on the day it happens and tells nobody anything in advance. A rotation lets someone look at September and know roughly what their next three Christmases hold. That predictability is a good deal of what people are asking for.

Split the day

Thanksgiving is two shifts, and one of them is usually fine. The morning is quiet. The afternoon is the one with family in it. Treat the whole day as a single prize and one person wins it. Split it and two people get to sit down to a meal at home.

The same goes for the pieces nobody puts on the list. Christmas Eve evening, when the house is wound up and someone steady has to be in it. The stretch between Christmas and New Year, where everyone assumed everyone else was covering. New Year's overnight, which is a real shift and should belong to someone who put their hand up for it.

And the day program is closed

Worth saying out loud in September: the houses need more hours over the holidays, not fewer. Day program shuts for a stretch of it, and a house that's normally quiet from nine to three is a full day, every day, for everyone who lives there.

So the week people most want off is also the week with the most hours in it. That's easy to miss when the holidays get penciled in like ordinary weeks with a couple of gaps in them.

Ask who wants it

Some people will take the holiday. Someone doesn't celebrate it. Someone wants the differential. Someone would rather be at work than at their in-laws' and says so every year, cheerfully.

Ask before you assign, in writing, and see how much of the calendar fills itself. Then keep the list, because the people who volunteer this December are the first people you owe at the next one.

Say it in October

Being told early counts for nearly as much as the answer. Someone who finds out in October that they have Christmas Day can move Christmas to the 26th and mean it. The same person told on December 12 is cancelling something.

So post it, say it in a meeting, put a copy on the fridge. And if it has to change, tell the person yourself before they find it on the board.

And one small thing about the schedule

In Delegyn Shift, putting someone's time off on the schedule reopens the shifts they were already holding, so those days go back to showing as open instead of sitting there looking staffed. If your agency has staff sending their own requests, the Approve button says what it will cost before you press it — “Approve — 4 shifts reopen”.

The rest of it is the same job it has always been. Ask early, write down who worked what, and thank the ones who said yes.

Try it on this week See what it costs

Fourteen days, your real schedule, no card. $20 a month plus $1 per staff member.