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 second week. Also, any new employees hired who already have a vacation scheduled at a different time will have to take that vacation unpaid.