The busy months have started. Whether you prepared is no longer the question. What matters now is whether the plan you set up this fall works under real load, and whether you’ll find out before December if it doesn’t.
Call volume climbs from now through January. Most firms go into it with a plan that looked fine on paper. Plans rarely fail all at once. They slip a little at a time: a callback goes out a day late, removals keep landing on the same person, an on-call night is “covered” by someone who’s now out sick. None of these looks like a problem on the day it happens. By mid-December, together, they decide how families remember you.
So the useful time to check your plan is now, in the first two weeks, while the problems are still small.
Plans break in the first two weeks. Look there.
The homes that get through winter steady usually aren’t the ones with the best plan in October. They’re the ones that checked it in November. Three signals will tell you early whether yours is holding.
1. First-call response time is creeping up
This shows up first. A family calls, and the time it takes to get back to them stretches from minutes to an hour, then to “first thing tomorrow.” Nobody decided that. It happened because everyone assumed someone else had it.
The 10-minute check: Pull up the first calls from the past week. For each one, note when it came in and when a family member actually heard back from you. If the gap is growing, or if it’s much wider on nights and weekends, you’ve found your first crack.
The fix: Put one named person in charge of first-call follow-up for each shift. Not a team. One person.
2. Overdue tasks are piling up on the same two names
Every firm has its dependable people, and in a busy season, work moves toward them. It happens quietly: they say yes, they’re fast, and they’re already in the building. Within a few weeks, the same two people have most of the overdue tasks, and they’re the ones you can least afford to lose to burnout in January.
The 10-minute check: Filter your open tasks by assignee and sort by due date. If two or three people own most of what’s late, the problem is how work is spread, not how hard anyone is working.
The fix: Reassign now, while it’s a conversation and not an emergency. Then look at why the work drifted. It’s usually because the task never had a clear owner to begin with.
3. The on-call schedule is reverting to “whoever answers fastest”
You built an on-call rotation. Then someone swapped a night, someone else covered a shift informally, and now the real schedule is whoever picks up first. That works until the night nobody does.
The 10-minute check: Compare the schedule you published with who actually took calls over the past two weeks. If they don’t match, your schedule is a suggestion, not a plan.
The fix: Write down a backup for every on-call shift and make swaps official, even if that’s just a quick message to the group. A covered night should mean someone knows they’re covering it.
Ten minutes now, or a family later
Each of these takes about ten minutes to check this week. Left alone, each one can cost you a family by Christmas. That might be a missed callback, a delayed removal, or a night when the phone rang too long.
You don’t need a new plan. You need to know whether the one you have is working. Put a recurring 20-minute check on the calendar every Monday through January. Look at the three signals, fix what you find, and move on.
A plan you don’t check is just a plan you’re hoping works.