The Summer Handoff: How to Build a Team Where PTO Actually Works

Summer is hereeeeee which means summer vacations, out of office messages, and (hopefully) the “summer slowdown”. The season where everyone, even your most needy client, goes on vacation or takes a long weekend for a family vacation. Coworkers log off early on Fridays to enjoy the weather. And if you’re lucky, you have a few days/weeks off between now and Labor Day back to school season. 

For most of my corporate career, I didn’t really know a) that I was allowed to unplug during vacation and b) how to actually unplug (still working on the latter if I’m being honest). 

Just because PTO went on the calendar… didn’t mean the work paused or went away — I just took care of the work from a different location. For the majority of my career thus far, every team I was on ran the same way. We all said "enjoy your time off," and none of us meant "and we've got you while you're gone." True, disconnected time off, wasn’t something everyone was afforded nor given. 

If you have ever answered a "quick question" from a pool chair, or come home from a week away to 400 emails and a problem nobody flagged until you walked back in — this is unfortunately normal in today’s workplace. And if you are the manager reading this, watching your team quietly work through their own vacations: that is not loyalty. That is a coverage problem without work/life balance.

What is a coverage culture? It is the ongoing, repeated practice of a team making each other's time off real — naming who holds what, writing it down, and following through — so that "out of office" means out, not "reachable but resentful." It is not a one-time favor you call in before a big trip. It is a rhythm a team runs all year long, even in the summer.

Without it, the most reliable person on the team quietly becomes the most trapped. The handoff that never happened because everyone was too slammed the week before. The detail that lived only in one person's head. Especially with layoff culture being so prominent, we need to think about coverage culture as a way to refute the always on, “efficient” workforce. 

There are four moves that turn "enjoy your time off" from a phrase into a practice.

First, map the work before you map the vacation. A week or two before you are out, write down what genuinely needs a human while you are gone — not everything, just the two or three things that would actually stall. When I finally did this before a trip last year, I was stunned by how short the list was. Three items, not thirty. Most of what I had been guarding did not need me at all.

Second, name a person, not "the team." Coverage that belongs to "the team" belongs to no one. Pick one specific colleague for each item — Priya has the client check-in, Marcus has the invoice approvals — and tell them directly, out loud, before you leave.

Third, write the handoff down. You this document as a template. 

Keep it to a few lines:

  Coverage handoff — [Your name], out [dates]

  While I'm out, [Name] is the point person for [project or area].

  Two or three things that may come up: [list them].

  For [item A], you can decide without me. [Item B] can wait until I'm back.

  Everything else can wait. Truly.

  Back online [date] — [Name] will give me a 10-minute download that morning.

Fourth, protect the re-entry. The fastest way to erase a good week off is 400 unread emails on day one. Instead of letting the returning person excavate their inbox alone, have whoever covered them do a short verbal download. A manager or teammate can simply say: "Welcome back. Don't open the inbox yet — let's take ten minutes at 10 and I'll walk you through what actually happened. Two things moved, nothing is on fire."

The message you send before you leave matters just as much, and it should sound like a colleague rather than a legal disclaimer:

 "Hey Marcus — I've got you as point person for the Hartwell account while I'm out next week. Two things might surface: the proof approval and a budget question from their VP. For the proof, you can approve it without me. The budget question can wait until I'm back on the 8th. Thank you — and I've got your July week covered, same deal."

That last line is the whole culture in one sentence. Coverage only works when it runs both directions.

If you are the manager, one more thing. Your team watches what you do with your own PTO far more closely than they listen to what you say about theirs. The first person who needs to take a genuinely unreachable week is you. And the level of coverage someone needs will shift with their season — a new hire three weeks in needs a different handoff than a colleague who has run the same accounts for five years. Re-calibrate it as people grow.

I would love to tell you I have fully fixed this. I have not. I still catch myself drafting a "just one quick thing" message from the school pickup line. But I catch it faster now, and my team calls me on it when I slip — which is exactly how you know the culture is real.

A coverage culture is not a summer project. It is a small promise, repeated until people believe it: I've got you while you're gone. Make it this week, before the calendars fill up. Your reputation is built in the moments when you communicate clearly. So is your team's.

Want your team to actually unplug this summer? A Career Civility workshop turns coverage from a vague assumption into a team habit — book one here.