Driving home for Christmas (with payroll sorted)

With jumpers twinkling and tinsel glittering, it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Most people are looking forward to putting their feet up over the holidays. That might not be the case though if you’re an employer. Christmas consumerism is the bread and butter of many businesses, and December may be by far your busiest month. It’s great to be busy, but December can bring some seasonal trials and tribulations.

Christmas can be a time when employees, like yourself, are at their most stressed-out and tired. It’s important that you support them as much as you can to make the holiday season an enjoyable experience for everyone. And while you may not be able to control things like bad-mannered customers, there are steps you can take to keep employees happy, and help them survive the festive period.

Managing annual leave at Christmas

One thing that can be especially difficult at this time of year, is managing your staff levels. Of course, most employees will want to take some time off to spend with friends and family to enjoy the festivities. Unfortunately, it’s usually not possible to give everyone the time off that they want. Some employers may have a blanket rule that says employees cannot take time off during the Christmas period. If you want to be more flexible with employees and allow some time off, it can be difficult to plan and manage it in a way that is fair to everyone.

The best way to manage annual leave at the busiest times is to do it on a first come, first serve basis. If employees want time off around Christmas, they should let you know well in advance so that you can plan rotas around it. Using a cloud-based annual leave management tool can be a great solution to this.

When you get leave requests through email, text, or from a brief chat in the office, it can lead to mismanagement, such as approving multiple same-day requests or forgetting about a request altogether. One solution to this is letting staff make annual leave requests through a secure self-service portal, such as the BrightPay employee app. This means that employees can request leave at any time, from anywhere, and you can manage all of your requests from the one location. Once a request is accepted, it syncs back to the calendar too, so you can make well-informed decisions, on-the-go.

Make sure employees are paid on time or early at Christmas

Scared about delayed payments over the holidays? Making sure your employees are paid on time is always a top priority. At Christmas, the consequences of any late payments could be worse than usual. Some employers like to pay employees a few days early at Christmas time, to help them cover all the extra expenses that Christmas brings. If you pay employees a Christmas bonus, some employees may rely on that bonus to cover costs.

If you’re using a system where you must make sure bank files are uploaded three business days before employees will receive payment, any delay could mean employees not getting paid on time. With so many public holiday days in December, you need to be extra careful when planning. One way you won’t have to worry, is by using a payment platform which is directly integrated with your payroll software and that uses Faster Payments, to pay your employees.

You can make payments to employees, subcontractors and HMRC through BrightPay’s integration with payment platform, Modulr. These payments can be received in as little as 90 seconds, and they are processed 27/7, 365, including on holidays or weekends. So that means that even if you make a mistake in someone’s pay, you don’t need to panic, no matter what day it is, you can make sure your employee gets what they are owed, in a matter of minutes.

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This content may have been developed with the assistance of AI tools. Content is reviewed by a member of the Bright team before publication. Guidance on legislation can be obtained from your industry body.