Kathy Fava One thing you can do, if you have no choice about staffing over that week where everybody else gets time off, is ask for volunteers. So you don't make it mandatory for somebody to not hang out with their friends over Christmas, or go skiing somewhere, or whatever.
Jen Weaver Hey support leaders, Jen here. This week we're doing something a little different.
It's Thanksgiving week here in the US, and instead of skipping the episode, I called up Kathy Fava to talk about what the holidays actually feel like when you're leading a support team. Kathy is a compassionate, experienced support leader who has some great ideas about covering the holidays. We talk about everything from time off calendars and cultural inclusion to burnout, grief, and ways to support your team even if your budget is zero.
Just a caveat here: we are two white ladies from North America who are steeped in North American culture. We are doing our best to help support leaders who have global teams to be mindful of other holidays outside of what's going on in the United States, with dates and some more information about those. But we are not experts. So, as you'll see, we emphasize that you talk to your team about what's going on for them throughout the holidays.
This episode is practical, heartfelt, and designed for the season.
Before we get started though, our QA tool Supportman is what makes this podcast possible. Supportman sends real-time QA from Intercom to Slack with daily threads, weekly charts, and done-for-you AI-powered conversation evaluations. It makes it so much easier to QA Intercom conversations right where your team is already spending their day, in Slack.
All right, on to today's episode.
So it is Thanksgiving week, and we weren't going to do a podcast this week. But my guest Kathy Fava had a fantastic idea about preparing managers for the holidays. Would you tell me a little bit about this idea and how it came about?
Kathy Sure. We were thinking about the holidays, and being support people, we were thinking about all the problems that happen in the holidays. Things like your year-end close combining with your Christmas obligations, and how we can do a better job as leaders helping our teams through it and getting the work out the door — both — and turning it into a happy time again.
That's the nuts and bolts of it, I guess.
Jen That makes sense. A lot of us work remotely, a lot of this audience works with global teams, and so we tend to have the opportunity to manage people who have a different cultural background than we do, or many different cultural backgrounds.
So we wanted to do a little primer — is that a word? — about the different holidays, what dates they're going to be this year, a little bit about what the expectations around those might be. And then talk about holiday burnout, your team's and yours, and how to manage that. And what you can do if you have a budget, and what you can do if you don't really have a budget to support your team, which is often the case.
Kathy Yes. And there are a lot of things you can do without a budget, believe it or not, that will make your team members very happy — and in some cases be worth more than if you gave them an actual present. So we'll get into that.
Jen That's a little teaser, I love it.
First, the big one that I just want to get out of the way. I think we've both observed a lot of teams in Europe and remote SaaS companies in the United States tend to take a week or two and just shut down during December. A lot of times that's between December 25th — which is the Christian holiday of Christmas — through January 2nd or 3rd. Things just stop.
That's one important thing to know going into the holidays: a lot of teams just wind down. Now, in support that may not apply to us, because we do have to keep the phone lines ringing, so to speak. So a lot of support managers are tasked with scheduling out that break so that there still is coverage. And that can run into other holidays that people celebrate.
Kathy One thing you can do, if you have no choice about staffing over that week where everybody else gets time off, is ask for volunteers. So you don't make it mandatory for somebody to not hang out with their friends over Christmas, or go skiing somewhere, or whatever.
And then you can pay them back for that at another time of the year, by giving them the day off and calling it Christmas. Somebody might want to take a trip that they've got planned coming up, but they don't have the time — well, now they have the time. So you have to think about ways to make that work.
Jen That makes sense. And it's important to remember too, there are people who don't celebrate any holidays over this period of time — whether that's because they're just not interested in holidays, or they're not religious. Those people might like the opportunity to earn a little extra gratefulness from their team for stepping up and working those days.
Kathy Absolutely. And often, even though you're manning the queue, nothing happens. So you get a chance to catch up on whatever. And when everybody else comes back and they're scrambling, you're just like, oh, I'm cool, everything's fine.
Jen And I'm the hero.
Kathy Absolutely.
Jen So for us in North America, the other big holiday that tends to be celebrated around December is Hanukkah. And the dates of Hanukkah change every year, right?
Kathy Yes, they do.
Jen So you always have to look them up on the calendar.
Kathy And that's what we're here for. This year Hanukkah is December 15th through the 23rd. So right before Christmas Eve, which is on December 24th.
I think it depends on how religious you are, if you're celebrating Hanukkah, whether you want to take the day off or not. But again, keep in mind that your staff who celebrate it are moving into that time just before Christmas. You're not all just moving into Christmas. So be sensitive to that and realize they've got other stuff going on outside of work.
Jen That makes sense. And that brings me to what we talked about earlier before we started this episode — that we have a limited perspective, based on a little bit of research that we did. But it's important as a manager to ask your team.
I hope this episode will give folks a little bit of framework around, oh yeah, Hanukkah starts on December 15th, for example. But really it's about one-on-one connecting with your team about what time off should look like for them this December.
Kathy I think the first thing is to be aware of what your team celebrates, what each team member celebrates. And you might even handle this way in the pregame, when you're onboarding new team members — ask them, so you can get a jump on it.
And then as you're heading into the holidays, you might want to have one-on-ones with your team members concerning not just what you've got going on, but — where are you overwhelmed? What's going on in your life that you'd like to share, that would help me take better care of you as a team member? Just letting them in, if they want to come into your world, and seeing how you can help.
I think even offering to do that will be really important to your team members, especially those who celebrate holidays which are non-Christmas, non-Thanksgiving, non what we consider the standard holidays.
Jen Here in the US and North America where we are.
And it's not just about time off, either. My kids are of Romanian descent, and so every December — I can't remember the date now — we would celebrate St Andrew's Day, and they would get little candies or little toys in their shoes. That's a fun little thing that we experience, and that I as a mom was preparing for among the many holiday things.
And then there's Bodhi Day on December 8th, which a lot of Buddhists celebrate — not necessarily with a day off, but with meditation or chanting. It's not typical that a whole day off would be taken. But again, you can talk with your team about those things. Maybe that's a good conversation topic. Maybe it's not, for a team sort of icebreaker.
Kathy Sure. I think you have to know your team, and see if they're really close and they would want to share that kind of thing and appreciate what the other team members are saying.
Jen I think it is a good topic. And then you get to learn more about what the holiday is about.
Kathy And if a team member celebrates Christmas, you get to know what they love, what they hate about Christmas, and what they go through at Christmas. Basically, what everybody goes through.
Jen Even if you have a completely non-diverse team and everyone celebrates the same holiday, everyone celebrates it so differently. My partner always unpacked stockings on Christmas Eve, which to me is — no, you do that on Christmas morning.
I think that's a really interesting way that everyone's traditions are different.
Kathy True.
Jen So talking about that could be really fun. But you're right — know your team. How close are they? How comfortable are they with that? Does that feel like mandatory fun, or is that a real fun conversation?
Kathy There is such a thing as mandatory fun, and you have to watch out for it.
Jen For sure. There are some other holidays too that you found, that I had never heard of. I'd really love for you to walk us through those.
Kathy Other than Bodhi Day, there's something called Las Posadas, and this year it's between December 16th and Christmas Eve, December 24th. This is celebrated by a great many Hispanic and Latino people in the US.
Las Posadas reenacts Mary and Joseph's search for shelter before Jesus's birth, and it honours the sacredness of refuge and the grace of being received. Again, it's celebrated by a significant portion of the Hispanic and Latino population in the US.
Jen That makes sense. A lot of the Hispanic and Latino population are Catholic. A lot of the South American and Central American countries are Catholic countries, so it makes sense that that would follow that liturgical calendar.
Kathy Right. It'd be nice to hear from your team members who celebrate it, for more details.
Jen I bet the food is great.
Kathy Of course.
Jen And then, unrelated to the liturgical calendar, there's Kwanzaa, which is a holiday developed in the mid 20th century. That's a celebration of African-American culture, and I think the celebrations of that vary widely. But the dates are December 26th to January 1st, which does mirror that European and North American shutdown time that a lot of software companies do.
It's really important to acknowledge that and celebrate it with your teammates, if you have teammates who celebrate it — because this is one way to come together in a very important way at this time when things are so divisive in the States, and maybe find ways to make us more together than apart. So I think that's a good holiday to think about things like that.
Kathy I love that.
Jen There's another holiday that my family celebrates called Yule, or the winter solstice. It's kind of an astronomical — several people in my family are not very religious — but it's almost a scientific holiday, to celebrate the solstice, the day with astronomically the least amount of light.
But it's also a pagan holiday. And there are more and more people of the pagan tradition. So I think managers can expect to have people on their team who maybe would even be uncomfortable asking for that time, but maybe gently being curious could help bring that out. That's December 21st, by the way.
Kathy And it's not really a celebration of the darkest day of the year, it's a celebration of turning toward the light. Because after that day, everything starts getting lighter little by little.
However you symbolically think of the light, a lot of people celebrate that.
Jen The holidays often have light in common as a theme running through them. I just love that that is a theme among many, many religious traditions, and especially the holidays around this darkest period of the year. That's really beautiful.
So there's one more — I don't even know if I want to call it a holiday — that you introduced me to. Can you tell us a little bit more about Blue Christmas?
Kathy Yes. Blue Christmas, typically observed on December 21st or 22nd, is sort of the anti-holiday. It's the holiday for people who are like, ugh, holidays. Or they've had some kind of tragedy happen during the holidays, for whatever reason.
Jen It happens a lot.
Kathy It does. And the holidays are not a happy time for them.
Some Christian churches got together in the late 20th century somewhere in North America and said, we have to take care of these people and honour them. So they developed the Blue Christmas holiday, and generally have services during that time for those who are experiencing a loss or hardship during the holidays. And it honours them by acknowledging that truth, and not pretending everything's happy because it's Christmas.
Jen That is a great note for managers. Because it's important not to just be all sunshine and holly bushes over the holidays, because a lot of people are experiencing grief.
When you have lost someone, the first holiday season after you've lost them is huge. It's almost sometimes worse than the acute grief, because it's the first time you're experiencing these traditions in the absence of that person. And then every year that can recur.
We lost my partner's mother last year, and last Christmas was pretty hard for him. So being attuned to that, and not just coming at the holidays with all cheer and joy, because that can make people feel isolated — I think that's really important.
Kathy Even if you're not talking about Blue Christmas, there will be people on your team who are sad, or angry, or annoyed, and don't like the way Christmas is. Wanting to not have to go to all those obligatory parties and so on.
And you have to know who they are and reach out to them too, find a way to help them too. Because if it's hard for you, it's really hard.
Jen And it can be really isolating if you feel like you're in a group of people who all are super excited about the holidays.
Kathy Exactly.
I think that's it. I'm sure there are all kinds of little holidays celebrated somewhere, but I think we got the big chunks.
Jen And a lot of them, at the time that this podcast comes out, will have just passed — like Diwali in India is in October. Thanksgiving — as an American, I was educated a few years ago that Thanksgiving in the United States is a different day than Thanksgiving in Canada. Canadian Thanksgiving has already passed.
And then looking ahead a little bit, China and a lot of the East Asian countries — well, Japan celebrates the new year, and then there's the lunar new year, which is towards the end of January.
So looking ahead, and making sure, if you have people from that region of the globe on your team, just being aware that that's a huge deal for a lot of people that we don't tend to think about a lot in the US.
Kathy There are lots more people in the world than just us.
Jen That's true. Despite maybe what we think a lot of the time.
And especially, I talk to so many support leaders who are on global teams who will say to me, well, I have people in Indonesia, Australia, the Middle East, the UK, South America and North America. That's a lot to culturally educate yourself about. So this episode is just a spark, just the very beginning of what you could explore.
Kathy And I would encourage you — there might be a temptation to be like, forget it, I'm not going to celebrate anything, I don't care what it is. But don't go that way. Get to know your team and what they celebrate, and be a good manager and take that in.
Jen And what they celebrate and what they don't celebrate.
Speaking of which, can we talk for a second about Thanksgiving? When this episode airs, it'll be two days before Thanksgiving.
I have, throughout my life, gone back and forth about celebrating Thanksgiving. It's not been my favourite — it's a lot of work as a mom to celebrate Thanksgiving.
But a lot of US companies are going to probably take Thursday and Friday off this week, if not Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Whatever you do with that time, of course, is yours.
For a long time we went out to an Indian restaurant, an East Indian restaurant, because they're always open on Thanksgiving and I didn't want to cook. That was our tradition, and they loved that.
Do you have Thanksgiving traditions you follow, or that you've seen from people you've managed?
Kathy I'm kind of a typical Thanksgiving person. I go over to friends and eat a lot of food.
I had a manager one time and she was just great. She was Jewish, and she told me they always went out for Chinese food, because that's what was open around where she lived.
Jen Chinese food and Indian food. Hot tip for this holiday season.
The Thanksgiving holiday can be kind of the gateway into the holiday burnout season. So we should probably talk about burnout during the holidays — yourself as a manager and your team, identifying it maybe.
Kathy Sure. You kind of get it from both sides. Your personal life with the holidays and all that that brings, good and bad, and also the year-end pressures of work. You've got people off, you've got more to do, and teams trying to balance it. And they're probably a little crabby sometimes, understandably.
So you have to try and figure out, how can I help, and how can I still get all the work done? That's the setup. It's tricky, it's a lot.
But there are things you can do that can really help. One thing — and presumably you do know your team now, and you understand what they celebrate, what they don't, what they like about the holidays, what they don't — be flexible. Try to accommodate them.
If they're like, my husband's parents are flying in in two hours and I'd really like to go home and change before I have to pick them up at the airport — stuff like that. Try to give a little with that for each of your team members that need something like that. A small thing can make a huge difference to them, and they'll remember that. Besides just being the right thing to do, it'll help with loyalty, it'll help with connection, it'll help with all kinds of things.
Something else you can do — and I probably should have said this first — is check in with each of your team members, and with the team as a whole, to see how they're doing. If they want to offer something about stressors at home, like they volunteered to cook the whole meal and boy, are they sorry already. Or having a lot of pressure at work with this or that responsibility.
You can even find out where they're really in trouble. And if they're really in trouble, find out if any of your team are like, I'm okay, I'm getting through it. See if you can swap things out a little bit. See if you can get some volunteers to help out the people who are struggling. That can be so helpful, and really bind your team together in a good way.
And presumably it balances out, because you've got a good team. You don't have slackers who always need help, or people who always have extra time on their hands. So it's not about that.
Another thing you can do — this might be more of a Christmas present than a Thanksgiving present — you can give each of your team members a kind of opt-out card, for one thing. Not something that's their responsibility and a big deal, but — I feel like I always am in charge of the stupid football pool and I'm really sick of it.
Jen Like a get out of jail free card.
Kathy Yep. They can use their opt-out card and somebody else will be doing it. And I think there are plenty of things like that going on that can go somewhere else. Maybe somebody wants to do it. Try to give them that little present.
Jen Oh my god, that person who wants out of the football pool administration task will be so happy for that Christmas. It'll probably be their best one.
And you have a hack about a to-do list that you were telling me about that is pretty brilliant. Will you share that?
Kathy Sure. This works personally, if you're stressing out over all these things you have on your list. Maybe it goes onto two pages and you're really in trouble.
You can also do this with your team. You can meet as a team and look at your list and be like, what really do we have to have done by New Year's? Oh, really? What if we don't get this done by New Year's? What's going to happen?
And if everybody's like, well, nothing really, we just wanted it done — then, okay, well, maybe this goes beneath the urgent line.
And if you start peeling back the layers on your to-do list, some things will be able to be pushed out, crossed off altogether, changed a little bit. Some people have ideas about — yeah, we have to get this done, but do we have to do all these parts of it? Do we have to go into as much detail? Do we have to do this other thing that we added on earlier, because we thought that'd be really great, but now it's adding a lot of work?
So just be merciless with your to-do list. And once you've got what's left, in theory it should be a lot smaller and more doable.
Jen The consequences. Are there consequences if I don't do this or not?
Kathy If there aren't, then why is it even on the list?
Jen That's a great way to separate the must-haves from the nice-to-haves.
Kathy As a manager, you can even go — if your team owes another team something, you can go to the other team and say, I know we promised to do this and we will if you still need it, but do you still need it by this date?
And the other team manager might say, oh my god, we've got so much on our plates, we're not even going to get to that till February. Then — yay, you can move that little line.
So think of options you might otherwise have dismissed, like asking for an extension. Because that's fair, and you might do that for that team sometimes.
Jen That's a good point, I like that. Thinking of alternatives.
Before we wrap up, just one more thing — how to give back to your team if you have a budget, which is great, giving them gifts. But you also have some ideas about how to give back if you don't have a budget. Can you talk us through those?
Kathy Sure. One of my favourite ideas is based in the fact that we never appreciate our team members enough. Maybe we thank them for getting something done, but they're like, I'm really good at this particular thing and nobody ever notices it.
So as a manager, you can do some digging for the real gifts that are unique to each team member, and ways they contribute. Things they've gotten done, for sure — accomplishments and projects — but also what you appreciate about their gifts, their skills.
Maybe they're really good at connecting dots where other people aren't seeing things. Or maybe they're not the flashy person that does this or that really visible project, but without them the team would fall apart, because they do all kinds of grounding things that keep people together and on track, and they pay attention to stuff other people aren't seeing.
So my idea is to handwrite a really personal note to each team member, and make sure you thank them for those things that are special about them, and not only for what they've done.
And then you can have all kinds of fun with this. You can have everybody in a meeting together, whether it's virtual or not. I would switch the notes around — give this team member's note to someone else to read to them, so that they can experience it being read aloud. And go through the whole team that way.
And then they get to keep the note. Maybe you'll even give them a nice little frame or something like that to go with it. Not a lot of money. But something like that is a unique gift that maybe nobody else has ever done for them, and everyone gets one. I just think that'll be probably one of the best things they got that year.
Jen I love that idea. Especially if you're on a remote team and you're not able to do that in a meeting — how rare is it to get a written note in the actual mail?
Kathy Right, very rare now.
Jen But as a manager, you have the ability to know where your team members live and send them something. So it'd be really special.
Kathy You can even write funny things all over the envelope and have fun with it.
Jen Stickers.
Kathy You could send stickers, right?
Jen I love that idea. Bringing it to a more personal experience.
I'm not actually sure who, if anyone, is going to listen to a podcast over the Thanksgiving holiday. Today being Tuesday before Thanksgiving, everybody in the US is rushing to get things done before going out. But hopefully this has provided some useful preparation for the holidays.
I appreciate you for coming up with this idea and bringing it to the podcast.
Kathy Well, thank you. It's been a pleasure to talk with you about these things.
Jen Thanks for spending part of your Thanksgiving week with us. I hope this conversation sparked some ideas you can use with your team, or just made you feel a little bit better about heading into the holiday season.
Let's talk about what steps we went through.
First, start with conversations. Ask your team what holidays they observe, what those holidays mean to them, and what kind of support they need. Don't assume everyone is on the same calendar.
Two, offer flexibility without breaking coverage. Let people trade shifts around their values and their needs.
Three, watch for burnout, including your own. It's really an intense time at the end of the year — not only are we trying to finish all of our tasks, but we have an additional set of responsibilities for whatever holidays we celebrate. So make time in your one-on-one check-ins to talk about redistributing workloads and helping out your folks. Also keep an eye on your own burnout.
Four, give back to your team even if you don't have a budget. Personalized thank you notes, opt-out cards, schedule flexibility — those can go further than monetary gifts.
And five, be mindful of holiday grief. The holidays are not a joyful time for everyone, so recognizing that this season maybe doesn't fit with mandatory fun can go a long way. A simple "I see you" really helps your team feel like they belong.
Thanks for being here. Please share this podcast with other support leaders, and please do subscribe everywhere that you can. I'll see you next time.