Short-staffed during the holidays

In smaller organizations, sometimes if the manager just asks if anyone is available to be on-call can make a difference. Also, management must publish a deadline for vacation requests. Many organizations have a cutoff of over 2 months prior to theholiday season, and then they add the variable of first come, first served to seniority for granting vacation time. Management's goal should definitely be to satisfy the employees while not endangering the operations of the organization.

Having been in that environment, you have several ways to do things. Offer financial or other incentive for folks to stay home for the holidays is a good approach, along with taking stock in what assets also have to be available anyways. For example, I was part of a tech support group that had to provide holiday support for those customers running 7/24 operations. We were also tasked with assisting on on call IT support staff should there be any issues during that time.

One can avoid a lot of hard feelings, by finalizing the holiday schedule early enough for people to book good travel arrrangements. (ie early Oct) Also rotate who gets first dibs, from year to year; otherwise you can loose junior people you might want to keep. As a personal choice, I have often covered for people with small children at Christmas.