Onam, Eid And The Plan Your Schedule Ignored

You planned a delivery for the last week of August. Half your Kerala team is travelling home for Onam and you find out the week before. The plan was never wrong about the work. It was wrong about who would be there.

Building a holiday calendar for a team working across Kerala and the Gulf means two things. Put both holiday lists in one shared calendar, and mark the weeks either side of the big ones, because availability drops before and after the official days rather than only on them.

Neither list sits on fixed dates

This is the part that catches teams who plan a year ahead from memory.

• Onam follows the Malayalam calendar and lands around August or September. The ten days build to Thiruvonam. The dates shift year to year.
• Eid al Fitr and Eid al Adha follow the lunar calendar. They move earlier in the Gregorian year each time, and the exact days are often confirmed close to the date.
• Ramadan shifts the same way, and working hour arrangements during it vary by employer and location. Check the current guidance rather than assuming last year's.

So a calendar built once and never updated is a calendar that will be wrong within a year. Refresh it at the start of every year and again a month before each major holiday. The clock itself is the easy part, since the ninety minute gap between Kerala and the UAE rarely breaks a plan on its own.

The weeks either side are the real cost

An official holiday of three days rarely costs you three days.

• People travel. Kerala fills with returning family around Onam, and flights and trains from the Gulf book out early. Somebody who takes three holidays may be away for eight.
• Work slows before. In the last two or three days people close things down rather than start them.
• Work restarts slowly after. The first day back is catch up, not output.
• Approvals stall. If the one person who signs off is away, everything behind them queues.

Mark the surrounding week as reduced availability, not as normal. It costs you nothing on paper and saves the awkward conversation later.

Build the calendar in four steps

• Collect both lists. Public holidays for Kerala and for the emirate your team sits in. They overlap almost nowhere.
• Add the personal layer. Ask each person which holidays they actually take and when they travel. Some people work through a public holiday. Some take a week around one that is only a day. Anyone split across two products needs both plans to know about the same trip.
• Mark the shoulders. One week before and a few days after each major holiday, flagged as reduced.
• Put it where the plan lives. A holiday list in a document nobody opens does nothing. It has to sit next to the work.

That last point is the one most teams skip. SicherOne keeps project records and HR records on the same set of data, so a board shows who is on leave without anyone cross checking a separate spreadsheet. Whatever tool you use, the test is the same: can someone looking at next week's plan see who will not be there, without leaving the screen.

Rules for planning around them

• No hard deadline inside a holiday week or the week after. Move it to the week before or two weeks after.
• Get approvals early. Anything needing a signature should be signed before the shoulder week starts.
• Name a cover person for each role, in writing. Not "ask the team", a name. Cover matters most for the live hours, because four hours of overlap is plenty only when somebody is actually in them.
• Do not schedule a start. New work started just before a holiday loses its momentum entirely. Finish things instead.
• Assume travel days are not working days, even when someone offers to work from the road.

Tell clients before they ask

A client who hears in July that you will be light in the last week of August will plan around it. A client who finds out in the last week of August will remember it. One email, sent early, with the specific dates and who to contact, prevents most of the annoyance.

The events side of the same calendar

Onam is not just a gap in the plan. It is one of the busiest periods in Kerala for events, from temple festivals to community celebrations. EventifyPlus lists what is on across Kerala, including Onam, Thrissur Pooram, Kathakali and Theyyam performances and backwater boat races, which is useful both for people deciding what to do and for organisers who otherwise rely on word of mouth.

For a team, the same information is a planning input. If you know the district your colleagues are travelling to is in the middle of a week of events, you know what their availability really looks like.

Start with one page

Both holiday lists, the shoulder weeks marked, cover names against each role, and the date you will refresh it. Share it now rather than in August.