Over the years managing the holiday time off and vacations was always a challenge, who is going to be in town to manage problems and situations as they pop up during those extended outages. The two things I would focus on was who will be in town to during the scheduled downtime to handle the unexpected call and how do I spread out the responsibilities for the on call requirements to make it fair to all employees.

The first is to establish a yearly procedure so you can control who can request vacation during the season so you will always have a qualified on-call person available and the second is to develop a daily rotation so one person is strapped with all of the calls over the extended period. On the vacation request policy there are two basic ways to set it up,

1. Base it on seniority or, 
2. Set a yearly rotation policy so everybody in the organization gets an opportunity to share in the fun

On the daily rotation policy, if your plant or facility is down for several days I would try to divide the days up between all organization members so everybody has a chance to enjoy some downtime with their families.

Once you develop the policies and procedures for your particular organization make sure you communicate and publish all of the dates, responsible person and methods to contact them during their scheduled times.

See you next year.