We are currently trying to decide on a rule of how many staff in a call centre of 50 agents to allow on holiday at any one time.
We are thinking of no more than 4 at one time.
Could you tell me what holiday allowance policies you have for the number of staff allowed off?
Nick
I don't think that only allowing 4 staff off would work.
If you do the maths assuming 240 available working days in the year (260 - 20 days for sickness and public holidays), 20 days holiday works out as 8.3% of the time or an average of 4.2 people.
The problem is that many people are limited to taking their holiday during the school holidays. It may be that you can limit it to 4 people out of a team of 12, but not for the whole centre.
We have a limit of how many can be off at any one time but we calculate it by team and by skillset not an overall number. We also calculate a general rule but then have special rules in place where we calculate by week or by day. You have to have different rules for smaller skillsets where the margin for error is much smaller. The other main element is checking shift patterns - unless you have fixed shifts you can't have a general rule because chances are the four will want the holiday all on the same tricky shift.
Because work volumes alter by day/week/month etc, we don't try to have a set figure allowed off and decide upon holidays based on the staffing requirement for the period they want off. For example, during our Year End we may only allow 1 person off but during Christmas we may allow up to a dozen off. We are a similar sized operation to Nicks. This can make for trickier forecasting as the holiday bit of our indirectly occupied time is not a steady figure and changes by month in our forecasts but allows us to better manage peaks and troughs of work.
Ideally 10 % of the staff can be allowed to be on leave on a given day. Its important for the staff to plan their leaves well in advance for the calender year there by agents leaves can be prioritized and discussed with them individually .
Holiday's and absenteeism control are like babies, easy to conceive but hard to deliver :)
All the best !
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