Holiday Staffing and Beyond: Strategies to Prevent Burnout in Long-Term Care
A successful holiday staffing plan does more than cover shifts. It gives you and your team room to enjoy the season.
For residents in long-term care, the holidays can look a little different than they used to. But
the things that make them special haven’t changed: a familiar song, a family tradition, a thoughtful gesture, and someone who goes the extra mile to make them feel at home.
More often than not, that someone is a member of your team.
You see it in the small moments all over the building. The CNA who takes a few extra minutes to set a resident’s hair in curlers because her daughter is visiting today. The nurse who sings “Silent Night” with the resident who asks for it every year. The night shift taping paper snowflakes to the windows at 3am so the hallway feels festive when everyone wakes up. The aide who wheels a resident out to the patio to catch the Fourth of July fireworks, or the one holding up a tablet so a resident can watch her great-grandson open his presents.
And sometimes the most meaningful moment is the quietest one. For a resident facing a first holiday without their spouse, or whose family lives too far away to visit, it’s the caregiver who pulls up a chair and simply stays a while.
Your team puts their hearts into these moments. Honoring that work means making sure they have time for their own celebrations, too.
That starts with something less festive but just as important: the schedule. A thoughtful plan makes room for life outside work, shares the workload, and lets leaders enjoy their holidays without constantly wondering who will cover the next shift.
Holidays rarely go exactly as planned. Time-off requests, unexpected call-offs, and coverage gaps come with every one of them. Planning for them can make the holidays more manageable for your staff, your residents, and you.
These four strategies can help you protect your team’s energy, keep care consistent, simplify scheduling, and make room for celebration.
1. Protect Your Team's Energy with Proactive Holiday Staffing
Every building has a few people who rarely say no when a staffing gap needs covered.
The nurse who answers on the first ring. The CNA who has already picked up three extra shifts this month and would take a fourth if you asked. The person who says “I’ve got it” before you finish asking.
Sometimes, that person is you.
When holiday requests overlap with winter flu season or summer vacations, it’s natural to turn to your most dependable people — or cover the gap yourself. But relying on the same few people week after week can leave them depleted long after the holiday is over. Protecting their energy should start before the schedule gets tight.
Build these safeguards into your holiday plan:
Notice who keeps saying yes: Look beyond the number of open shifts to who fills them. Keep overtime a choice, not an expectation, and avoid making the same people your default solution.
Build a buffer early: Identify predictable gaps and arrange supplemental coverage well in advance. “Can you cover?” shouldn’t be the plan for every open shift.
Include yourself in the plan: Leaders need to protect time off, too. Plan coverage for your own responsibilities, so a day away doesn’t mean returning to an administrative backlog.
How GrapeTree can help: We complement your team, not replace it. Experienced CNAs, LPNs, RNs, and allied therapy professionals can help cover planned holiday gaps and unexpected seasonal absences, sharing the workload so your team has time at home, too.
2. Match the Coverage to the Need
Residents notice who walks through the door.
Especially in memory care, familiar faces matter. A caregiver learns who likes the blinds halfway open, who needs to hear the day’s plan twice before breakfast, and who settles in when someone hums Bing Crosby. That familiarity takes time and is worth protecting during the busiest stretches of the year.
A mix of shift-by-shift coverage and longer-term assignments can help you respond to immediate gaps while maintaining continuity where it matters most.
Plan for both predictable and unexpected needs:
Start with what you know: Collect holiday requests early, review planned vacations and leaves, and identify shifts that will need support. Each gap you anticipate is one less to solve at the last minute.
Use per diem coverage for short gaps: Shift-by-shift support can help with call-offs, weekend openings, or another immediate need.
User longer assignments for ongoing needs: Extended leave, parental leave, or a vacancy that will last for weeks or months may call for a longer-term assignment. In memory care, dementia halls, and high-acuity rehab units, that consistency gives a healthcare professional time to learn residents’ preferences and the unit’s routines.
How GrapeTree can help: Whether you need a CNA for one weekend night or an RN or allied therapy professional for a 13-week assignment, GrapeTree offers flexible staffing options for both immediate and ongoing needs.
3. Make Holiday Scheduling Easier to Manage
Somewhere in your building, a scheduler is balancing a color-coded calendar, sticky notes, and a mental list of who asked for what.
They know who needs Christmas Eve with their kids, who's driving six hours to see their mom for Thanksgiving, and who asked for the Fourth of July off — and why.
Holiday staffing takes work long before anyone clocks in. Tracking requests, balancing competing needs, coordinating swaps, and finding last-minute coverage can wear down the people managing it.
Clear processes can lighten that load:
Set expectations early: Share request deadlines, explain how requests are prioritized, and clarify how holidays rotate from year to year, so the same people aren't always working on Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year's. A transparent process helps people understand decisions, even when they don’t get their first choice.
Make shift swaps straightforward: Give staff clear guidelines for arranging trades. Letting coworkers help find solutions can ease scheduling work and build goodwill.
Make coverage easy to request: Use scheduling tools and staffing partners that simplify requests, leaving less time spent tracking down help and more time for the people in front of you.
How GrapeTree can help: Our online portal lets schedulers post open shifts, request coverage, review available healthcare professionals, and manage staffing needs in one place. When you’d rather talk through a need — even late on a holiday evening — our staffing team is available by phone 24/7.
4. Support Morale with Meaningful Recognition
What your team remembers about the holidays isn’t only the hours they worked.
They’ll remember whether someone noticed their extra effort, whether night shift received the same appreciation as day shift, and whether they had a chance to sit down together and laugh.
Recognition doesn’t have to be big. It just has to feel genuine.
Make appreciation part of the plan:
Bring the celebration to every shift: Holiday lunches usually happen at noon on a weekday, so night and weekend crews can miss out. Plan something for them, too — a warm breakfast as overnight staff wrap up at 6am, or a hot cocoa cart on a Sunday afternoon. It says “we see you” to the people who work the hours others don’t.
Celebrate beyond a single date: Not everyone celebrates on the same day or in the same way. Spread activities across shifts throughout the season. Invite residents to join a Thanksgiving gratitude wall, a cookie-decorating afternoon, a Fourth of July ice cream social, or a board of favorite holiday memories.
Protect time off: Let a day off be a day off. Limit calls and messages to what is truly necessary.
Thank people for specific efforts: “Thank you for sitting with her when her family couldn’t make it” says more than “great job this month.”
How GrapeTree can help: When a shift opens, supplemental coverage gives you an option beyond texting someone on their day off. That support helps turn “enjoy your time off” into a commitment you can keep.
Make Room for Care and Celebration
The curlers, the carols, the fireworks, and the paper snowflakes at 3am all come from people who care. A thoughtful holiday staffing plan is one way to care for them in return.
Plan ahead, match coverage to your needs, simplify scheduling, and protect time to recharge. With support across nursing and allied therapy roles, you can keep resident care at the center while giving your team (and yourself) room to enjoy every holiday on the calendar.
Ready to Plan Your Holiday Staffing?
If you're already a GrapeTree client: Reach out to your account manager or log into the Facility Portal to request per diem coverage or a long-term assignment.
If you're not partnered with us yet: Fill out our quick inquiry form and someone from our team will reach out within a business day to talk through your options.
