Every July and August, the same thing happens. Annual leave requests pile up, school holidays empty out half the office, and the people who stay behind end up covering for the people who don't. Nobody plans for this properly until it's already a problem.
It doesn't have to be. Temporary staff exist precisely for this kind of short, predictable pressure, and the businesses that use them well treat summer cover as routine planning rather than a last-minute scramble.
Why does summer hit teams harder than other times of year?
Summer leave rarely lands evenly. Parents take chunks of time off around school holidays. Everyone else wants their two weeks somewhere between June and September too, because that's when the weather is decent and flights are cheaper. The result is a six to eight week window where multiple people are out at once, often from the same department.
Add school holiday childcare into the mix and the pressure compounds. Even staff who aren't formally on leave might be working reduced hours, juggling childcare, or asking for flexibility they wouldn't need in February. None of this is unreasonable. It's just predictable, and predictable problems deserve a plan rather than a panic.
The teams that struggle most in summer are usually the ones who treat each request in isolation instead of looking at the calendar as a whole. By the time three people have booked the same fortnight off, it's too late to plan around it properly.
Why are temps the right answer, rather than just asking existing staff to cover?
Asking the remaining team to absorb extra work feels like the easiest option, because it doesn't involve recruiting anyone. It's also the option that quietly does the most damage. Staff who pick up someone else's workload on top of their own get tired, resentful, and more likely to start looking elsewhere themselves. You end up trying to plug a short term gap by creating a longer term retention problem.
Temporary staff solve the actual problem. They're available immediately, they're used to coming into a new business and working out the systems fast, and they're not committed to you beyond the period you need them. That last point matters. You don't have to build a six month plan around someone covering four weeks of holiday.
Good temps are also genuinely good at the job of being temporary. Adapting quickly, asking the right questions early, and getting productive within days rather than weeks is a skill in itself, and it's one that experienced temp workers have built up over multiple placements.
How quickly can a business actually get temporary cover in place?
Far faster than most people expect, provided you're working with an agency that already has a pool of vetted, available candidates rather than starting from a blank page. We can often place someone within days of a request landing, which matters when a member of staff calls in to say they need three weeks off for a family trip booked six months ago that nobody flagged internally.
The key is registering interest early rather than waiting until leave is confirmed. If a business knows June and July are going to be tight, raising that with us in April gives us time to identify the right people, not just any available people. Speed and quality aren't in tension if there's enough lead time, but speed alone, without preparation, usually means settling for whoever happens to be free.
What about the admin? Doesn't using temps just create more work for HR?
This is the part most businesses dread, and reasonably so. Multiple temp workers across different departments has traditionally meant multiple timesheets, multiple approval chains, and someone in HR or finance spending hours each week chasing hours and signatures.
We built our own digital timesheet system specifically to remove that burden. It's bespoke to ACR, designed around how our clients actually work, and it takes the admin out of using temporary staff almost entirely. Managers approve hours in a few clicks. Finance gets clean, accurate records without chasing anyone. There's no paper, no spreadsheet juggling, and no end of week scramble to work out who worked what.
The honest measure of a good temp solution isn't just whether the worker does the job well. It's whether using them creates more admin than it saves. Ours doesn't.
Is using temps just for short term gaps, or does it work for genuine business growth too?
Both, and the two often overlap more than businesses expect. A summer cover placement sometimes reveals a role the business didn't know it needed permanently, particularly if workload has been quietly growing and the temp simply exposes it. We see temp-to-perm conversions regularly, and they tend to work well precisely because both sides have already had a real trial period rather than a few interviews and a guess.
Even where the need genuinely is short term, the value extends beyond the immediate gap. A business that handles summer cover smoothly, without burning out its core team, is in a stronger position by September. Staff who weren't asked to absorb someone else's workload are more likely to be engaged, present, and not quietly job hunting themselves.
Summer leave is not a surprise. It happens every year, on broadly the same schedule, for broadly the same reasons. The businesses that plan for it treat it as routine. The ones that don't spend July and August firefighting and wonder why their best people start looking elsewhere in September.
We run a dedicated temp desk built for exactly this kind of short notice, high pressure need, backed by a timesheet system that takes the admin off your plate rather than adding to it. If summer is starting to look tight, get in touch and we'll talk through what cover could look like for your team.