ThemePeople & wellbeing
CardCard 57 of 65
Questions5 to explore
StepLook after people

Vacation & Time Off

Planned time away from work

Real time off is one of the clearest signals a team sends about whether it takes sustainable work seriously.

Vacation and time off encompasses formal annual leave, public holidays, parental leave, sick days, and any other planned time away from work. In a hybrid team with people across locations, time off is complicated by overlapping calendars, different public holiday calendars, and the risk that someone on leave still feels expected to check in because the boundary is vague.

The issues are not just individual: when someone is out, the team needs to cover their work, manage communication, and know what to do with things that come up. In hybrid teams where knowledge is often distributed and underdocumented, someone's absence can create gaps that are costly and stressful for everyone. Handling time off well requires both strong individual norms (you are really off) and practical team agreements (here is how we cover for each other).

Make it explicitWrite down how the team handles cover during time off: who is responsible for what, how the person on leave will communicate their absence, and what the expectation is about checking in.

How strong hybrid teams handle it

The same building block, handled well. These are patterns from teams that work well across locations, offered as illustrations to react to, not rules to copy.

Shared holiday visibility

A single calendar or tool where all team members mark their time off in advance (not just approved but visible to everyone) lets the team plan around absences rather than discovering them at the last moment. In hybrid teams spanning multiple countries, this is especially important for coordinating public holidays.

Real handover before leave

A brief written handover note before a significant absence (what is in progress, what someone else needs to know, who to contact about what) is one of the most practical things a team can normalise. It removes the anxiety of being gone and the burden on colleagues who would otherwise be guessing.

Out-of-office means out

Strong hybrid teams model being genuinely unreachable during leave: no checking Slack, auto-reply on email, no quick calls. Managers who do this visibly give permission for others to do the same. Teams that respect someone's time off when they say they are off build more trust than those that expect availability regardless.

Staggered cover agreements

For teams where continuous coverage matters, agreeing cover arrangements in advance (who handles what while someone is out) removes the scramble that happens when an absence is not planned for. This is a written team agreement, not something left to the manager to figure out each time.

Questions for your team

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

When someone on your team is on vacation, are they genuinely off, or do they feel expected to check in?
How does the rest of the team find out in advance about upcoming time off, and how far in advance?
What currently happens to ongoing work when someone is away, and is there a documented plan or does it depend on the situation?
Are there team members who take less time off than they should, and does the team have a sense of why?
How do you handle the different public holiday calendars if your team spans multiple countries?

Watch for

In hybrid and remote contexts, vacation that is not genuinely off (the person checks in regularly or stays available) does not restore the person and models a norm the rest of the team will follow or feel pressured to match.
When there is no cover plan, absences create stress for whoever picks up the pieces, which builds resentment toward the person who was out even if they were doing nothing wrong.
Teams in high-demand periods often informally expect people to delay or shorten leave, which creates an unspoken norm that nobody challenges until burnout becomes a team-level pattern.