Great, I’m off on holiday!
But remember that others are left with your work on top of their own. Depending on how you leave your pending work for them, you’ll find problems waiting when you get back from your break. The more you cooperate with your colleagues, the easier your return will be, because they’ll have solved many of your problems.
Let’s think of our colleagues and make their job easier, so they can fit their time around their own duties and those that come from temporarily standing in for you.
Plan and organise for the best handover
However much your colleague knows about your duties, you should organise and plan the work they need to do: by subject, by task and by urgency. This makes it easier for them to find their way and avoids mistakes that take longer to fix and give the company a bad image with the customers affected.
Explain concepts and procedures in detail, and specify how urgent each item is. The more detail you give about your work, the easier you make your colleagues’ job. And if your colleague gives you details of what they did, it will be easier for you to check that they carried out your duties correctly.
The more interest you show in your own tasks, the more interest your colleague will take in doing them as well as possible, seeing that they matter to the company.
It’s our work and our responsibility
Your colleague is only covering for you. You are the one who has to check how well they did and the results of their cover, correcting any mistakes that may have happened.
That will have depended on how responsibly you prepared your job for someone to cover it. The more detail you left about your work, the fewer mistakes there will have been.
Featured image: Dennis Hamilton, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
