| In a small company you often cannot have complete redundancy for everything. For any given area there will usually be someone who is better at it than everyone else there. If I'm incapacitated someone else will do the things I need to do that cannot be put off until I'm available again, but for some of those things it will take them longer and they might not do as good a job as I would have. It goes the other way, too. I've done things that other people are better at when they were on vacation or out sick. This is one of the reasons that documenting procedures is so important. For those things I do that do not have redundancy, I've written checklists and guides that others can follow to do most of the things I normally do. They have done the same for their areas of non-redundancy. Because of this, I can't think of any time in the last 15 years that someone had to be asked to work during their vacation. If something went wrong in their area, others were able to either fix it, or at least mitigate its effects sufficiently for the fix to wait for the person to get back. But I'm still going to take a look at email every day or so while on vacation, just in case. My checklists and guides aren't perfect. I'm not in an adversarial relationship with my coworkers, so on those rare occasions when they need to consult my guides and checklists when I'm away and those don't fully cover it, and I can dash off a clarification or suggestion that will help them and also save me a lot of time when I get back, I'm going to do it. |