Hey HR Pros! ❄️ OOO calendars multiply faster than PTO requests. It’s peak holiday season, where cheer meets coverage planning. Here’s to juggling out-of-office magic, fairness, and compliance.

TODAY’S CULTURE CUE
🕰️ Stop Holiday OOO Panic in 15 Minutes - Ask teams to share OOO dates, backups, and key tasks in one shared doc or chat thread so work keeps moving while people unplug.

The holiday season is here — which for HR means balancing merry time off with business needs. With nearly all employees planning to take time off and many feeling pressured to stay connected even while OOO, it’s a prime moment to get coverage right. Dayforce reports that nearly 95% of workers plan to take holiday time off, yet only 42% fully unplug — and 65% feel pressure to stay available even while ostensibly away.

📉 The coverage conundrum - Many teams shrink just when workload can remain steady. A vast majority of staff are eager for PTO, but burnout is common — 55% of U.S. workers report holiday-season burnout. With fewer employees on deck, service expectations can still hold firm. Shifts, approvals, and OOO requests pile up, and cross-team visibility is often lacking.

📌 What HR can do: Be proactive, not reactive.

1) Publish PTO deadlines early and use shared calendars so everyone can see who’s off when.
2) Cross-train teams so no one person is a single-point failure.
3) Set clear expectations about coverage and communication boundaries.
4) Encourage true disconnect, not checking inboxes from the ski lodge — it’s healthier and boosts return productivity.

Think of coverage planning like holiday cookie sharing — balance is key, and everyone benefits when there’s enough to go around!

✅ How to Manage Holiday OOO »

Digesting the data: New findings from EY’s 2025 U.S. Generation Survey reveal that workplace culture now outranks salary as the dominant factor influencing employee retention, with nearly all surveyed professionals saying culture dictates their choice to stay at a job and 60% saying it matters “a great deal.”

The most important cultural element? How people treat one another — ranking above leadership style, career growth opportunities, or company values in its impact on retention. This underscores a broader shift: in a year marked by economic uncertainty and workforce churn, workers increasingly value relational and human aspects of work over traditional compensation levers.

Outlook for HR: For HR leaders, this isn’t just another trend — it’s a strategic imperative. Retention won’t improve merely through pay adjustments; companies must cultivate an authentic, respectful culture and invest in learning, inclusion, and everyday interactions that make employees feel valued. That means auditing management behaviors, boosting people-skills training, and measuring culture sentiment regularly to close perception gaps before top talent walks.

Read the full scoop at HR Dive »

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