July. The holiday calendar was locked back in April, as the law requires, and the office starts to empty out in waves. The person who signs off expenses is in the Algarve. The colleague who handles payroll isn’t back until the 1st. Meanwhile, a holiday request needs an answer by Friday, an expense report has been sitting untouched for nine days, and a new hire starts on Monday and will need access to the onboarding process, as well as her contract and safety file. None of it can wait three weeks. And yet, more often than not, that’s exactly what happens.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The calendar doesn’t negotiate
In Portugal, every employee is entitled to 22 working days of holiday a year — it’s written into Article 238 of the Labour Code. And the same code, in Article 241, requires the employer to post the holiday map by 15 April, guaranteeing each person at least ten consecutive working days off. Put differently: by April, everyone already knows August will be a month of skeleton crews. It isn’t a surprise. It’s planning imposed by statute.
The catch is that almost everyone plans for the same month. According to Eurostat, roughly a third of Europeans’ tourism nights fall in July and August — on an average day across those two months, more than four million Europeans are away travelling. In Portugal, Statistics Portugal (INE) counted 28.6 million guest nights in the third quarter of 2025 alone. Translate that into what happens inside organisations and you get an uncomfortable picture: it isn’t one person missing at a time. It’s entire departments running at half-power, all at once, for six to eight weeks.
And HR processes? Those don’t take a holiday.
The single point of failure is called the inbox
A simple question. When the director who approves expenses is away, what happens to the reimbursement for the salesperson who drove 800 kilometres visiting clients? In most Portuguese companies, the answer is awkward: it waits. Stuck in an inbox nobody will open again until September. The same goes for the holiday request that needed a green light, the absence note left unvalidated, the new joiner who starts on Monday with access to nothing.
This happens because much of people management still lives in two places that were never designed for it — email and Excel. Around one in four companies with more than a thousand employees admits that spreadsheets and email are still central to HR operations. And spreadsheets are treacherous. The European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group, the European community that has spent more than two decades cataloguing Excel disasters, estimates that the overwhelming majority of spreadsheets in use contain errors. One badly copied cell in the holiday map, or a formula that quietly stopped adding up when someone inserted a row, and an employee’s leave balance no longer matches reality. Nobody notices. Until they do — usually at the worst possible moment.
Summer doesn’t create these problems. It merely exposes them. When the whole structure depends on one specific person knowing where the right file lives and having time to answer the right email, it only takes that person heading to the beach for everything to seize up.
A platform, not a collection of islands
This is where the difference that changes everything shows up — and, oddly, one that almost nobody grasps until they see it working.
Over the years, many organisations bought a tool for each pain. One for payroll. Another, separate, for booking holidays. A standalone form for expenses. A shared sheet for training. And performance reviews? A Word document that does the rounds by email once a year and that nobody can quite locate afterwards. Each piece lives on its own island, with its own login, its own data, its own version of the truth. When systems don’t talk to each other, someone has to copy data across by hand. And, yes, you guessed it: that someone goes on holiday too.
An integrated HR platform starts from the opposite premise. Payroll, the employee self-service portal, holidays and absences, expenses, training, performance appraisal and — now mandatory — pay transparency analytics all live in the same place, on the same data. An employee submits an expense from their phone and the system already knows which cost centre it belongs to. A holiday request is deducted automatically from the correct balance, the very balance the manager sees at the moment of approval. Book a training session and the hours land in the person’s record without anyone re-entering them. A single source of truth, with no emails cross-checking information and no spreadsheets drifting apart from one another. And it’s precisely that single source that lets someone else pick up a process without first having to rebuild the entire context.
Take the case of the new hire starting in August. In an island model, onboarding depends on half a dozen people — and half of them are away. On an integrated platform, she fills in her details through the portal before she even arrives, signs documents digitally, accesses her onboarding process and safety information on day one, and the workflow moves forward even if her line manager only returns a fortnight later.
Delegating isn’t forwarding an email
Which brings us to the point that gives this piece its title. Continuity over the summer isn’t solved with goodwill. It’s solved with delegation done properly.
Delegating properly is not writing “while I’m away, talk to Sofia" and crossing your fingers. It’s configuring, inside the platform, that for two weeks the requests that would go to João are routed to Sofia instead — with a start date, an end date, and an automatic return to normal when João is back. It’s having escalation rules for when a request goes unanswered after 48 hours. It’s making sure Sofia sees exactly what she needs to decide, and nothing beyond that.
The difference against email isn’t one of convenience. It’s one of security and accountability. When an approval happens inside a system, there’s a record of who decided, when, and on whose behalf. There’s an audit trail. And the GDPR demands it: Articles 33 and 83 of the European regulation deal with breach notification and with fines that can reach 20 million euros or 4% of worldwide annual turnover. A spreadsheet full of salaries and tax numbers, emailed to whoever is standing in for someone, is exactly the kind of thing that keeps a data protection officer awake at night. A delegated, time-boxed, logged access does not.
There’s also a European deadline that won’t wait for September. The EU Pay Transparency Directive (2023/970) had an indicative transposition deadline of 7 June 2026, and companies with 250 or more employees will have to report gender pay differences on a recurring basis. This is not something you improvise in a spreadsheet the night before the deadline. It calls for remuneration data that is organised and auditable across the whole year — summer holidays included.
Summer is an architecture test
At heart, August works as a diagnosis. The company that grinds to a halt when three key people go on holiday doesn’t have a holiday problem — it has a design problem. It concentrated critical processes in individuals rather than resting them on a structure able to carry them while those individuals, entirely within their rights, get some rest.
The organisations that sail through summer without incident rarely have more people or more dedicated ones. They have their processes in one place, reachable from a phone, with approvals that can be delegated in a click and a record of everything done and by whom. Requests don’t get stuck. Expenses are reimbursed on time. Salaries are processed on the right date. And the people on the beach can, at last, actually be on the beach.
This summer, it might be worth turning the question around. If tomorrow the three people who hold HR together all went on holiday at the same time, would your organisation keep running — or would it wait for September?
The answer says almost everything about the work to be done before next August.
UnikPeople is Uniksystem’s all-in-one HR platform: payroll, employee self-service portal, holidays and absences, expenses, training, performance appraisal and pay transparency, in one place, with secure process delegation. To see how to keep your HR processes running all year round, talk to our team.
Uniksystem — Technology at the service of people and organisations.