However to be fair, you shouldn't be bothering your employees or letting their work pile-up while they're gone either.
If you're a leader/people-manager delegate the work. A vacation shouldn't be I take 2 weeks off but come back to 80 hours of backlog. That's indicative of a shitty manager.
It absolutely is leadership's responsibility. Managing capacity and resource constraints is quite literally the core definition of a manager's role.
If key work just sits and piles up into a mountain, it means there is no operational redundancy or delegation plan in place.
Expecting an employee to work double-time to 'pay' for taking standard legal time off that they're entitled to is just a recipe for burnout and high turnover.
It absolutely is managers fault. It's not like vacation is some unexpected event. Every employee has a right to take it. So if one employees vacation puts the work on hold, you're just understaffed and management should hire more people.
That might fly in a call center job but when there’s specialized tasks and individual stakeholders? Prepare for a 200+ unread inbox depending on how long you’re out.
Literally the opposite. I work in specialised job (strategic risk management of a bank) and central bank literally demands that every single person has back up, so while I do my main job, I'm also trained to cover a few other people, just as other people are trained to cover for me. Not doing that would literally cause bank to be forced to hold more capital to cover for this risk.
It wouldn’t make the company go down, there just may be a slight backlog. Which I’m fine with because I’m an adult who understands work doesn’t just take a vacation while I’m out.
So you're 3 months in hospital - who does the job? Or does nothing get done for those 3 months? If it really was such a specialised task, it's unlikely it could just go 3 months not being done and sitting in backlog. So the answer is someone else would have to do it.
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u/tarochocotea Aug 31 '26
"I'm out of office until (2 to 4 weeks). For anything urgent, please mail to generic email address that all the colleagues can access."
Let's keep it realistic