How small businesses can cope with employees going on sick leave or holiday

Small business owners. How do you prepare for your employees leaving or getting sick?

For example, if you have only one team member for a certain product or service and they can’t work for two weeks, how do you replace them if the company is niche or small?

How do you prepare for this?

1. Keeping capacity at a manageable level

Don’t max the capacity of each person, we work to 80%.


2. Have some outside (freelancers) always ready to help you?

Have a scalable resource that can be brought in to help when needed. This could be to cover sickness/holidays/any new short term projects.

3. Create frameworks and documented processes

The most important one, though this will take some time to put together.

Build frameworks for each of your deliverables enabling anyone in your team or new members to pick up where someone left off and deliver the same quality.

4. Emphasise quality over quantity

Another key angle is this: become a low-volume, high-quality small business by design.

Try to keep your workload quite low, so that you can step in and cover each other’s work.

When a specialist has a baby, is sick, or simply wants to take time off, make sure to provide 4-6 weeks of paid vacation each year to cover this.

It means there’s a bit more work from time to time, but your workload will be so low that it’s still quite manageable.

With this approach, you might not be able to outsource any of you work, as there simply isn’t a place for outsourced work in your niche, so could prefer to keep it all in-house and therefore freelancers aren’t an option.

Once you follow this advice and start to productise your services, you will an increase in productivity, quality, consistency of deliverable and results.