Strategy: Bi-Annual Lab-Wide Shutdowns

If you email our lab during the first two weeks of July, you’ll get this message: ‘We are closed for our annual summer break for two weeks to give our team a chance to rest and reset. We will not have any access to email…and will connect with you upon our return.’

The Fourth of July is a historically slow time for us and, each May, we let our clients know we’ll be closed for those two weeks; if an employee only has two weeks of vacation, this is when he has to take it. The advantage of a lab-wide shutdown is that it doesn’t continually leave our business without critical people, which affects workflow and productivity; all of our employees get a chance to refresh; and I don’t have to worry what happened when I was away on vacation. 

Even new hires get those two weeks off, with a caveat: We pay the employee for the first week and, if he’s still with us by end of year, we then pay him for the...