Short-Staffed Only in the Busy Season? Where to Start Preparing

The short answer

If you run short of people at the same time every year, the shortage is predictable. Covering a predictable gap with overtime and borrowed staff every single year wears down the same few people and pushes them toward the legal overtime limits. Before the season starts, estimate the size of the peak from last year's records, and break the extra work into pieces that anyone can pick up.

Does the same month catch you out every year?

In manufacturing it might be the production push before the financial year closes. In logistics and warehousing it is year-end or sale-season shipping. In the office it is the year-end close and renewal paperwork. The timing differs by industry, but most people on the floor know exactly which weeks are hard.

What is often missing is a number. How many overtime hours did the department work last December, and which tasks absorbed the time? Few companies can answer that straight away. Without the record, this year's plan stops at "probably as bad as last year," and preparation starts too late.

Why overtime and borrowed staff are not enough

When the only response is overtime plus people lent from other departments, the load lands on the same shoulders. The lending department falls behind on its own work, and a second peak appears after the busy season ends.

There is also a legal ceiling. According to Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, overtime set in an Article 36 agreement is capped in principle at 45 hours a month and 360 hours a year. Even where there are temporary special circumstances and labour and management agree, overtime must stay within 720 hours a year, an average of 80 hours across multiple months (including work on rest days), and under 100 hours in any one month (including work on rest days). These caps have applied to small and medium-sized companies since April 2020. Some sectors (construction, driving work in transport, doctors and others) have different start dates or different caps.

When one person's overtime is concentrated in the busy season, it is not only the peak month that approaches the limit; the average across the surrounding months does too. "Just push hard for one month" does not always hold. If overtime runs high all year round, see our column on overtime and staff shortages.

Plan ahead rather than hire in a hurry

Once the busy season is in sight, it is usually too late to start looking for people. The first job is to estimate the size of the peak.

1. From last year's attendance records, pull overtime hours by department and by week for the busy period
2. List the work that increased (shipments, inspections, customer enquiries, data entry)
3. Split that work into what only the usual person can do and what someone else could do once the steps are written down
4. Look for work you can bring forward into quiet months (preparing materials, updating master data, reviewing procedures)

If attendance is recorded as daily clock-ins, step 1 comes straight out of the monthly totals. If it lives on paper time sheets or in a different spreadsheet for each department, this is where you lose time. Attendance records you can read back later are not just for payroll; they are the raw material for next year's plan.

Break the extra work into pieces others can take

Whether the extra hands are part-timers, colleagues from other departments or outside workers, the first few days go on explaining what to do. To shorten that, cut the busy-season work into pieces that can be learned in half a day.

In a warehouse, for example, do not teach picking, inspection, packing and labelling as a single flow. Make it possible to teach packing on its own, and labelling on its own. Keep the tasks that need judgement, such as contacting the customer about a stock-out or choosing a substitute, with the usual staff.

Outside help is also an option, through worker dispatch (haken) or contracting (ukeoi). Under dispatch, a person employed by a staffing agency works under your company's direction. Under contracting, the contractor directs and manages its own workers, and the ordering company may not give those workers instructions directly. Either way, the options are much easier to weigh once the work is already broken down. The differences are set out in our column on dispatch and contracting.

Treat normal months and the busy season as two setups

Picture a warehouse of about 30 people where shipments rise from November into December. If it enters the season on its normal setup, the overtime piles up on a handful of shipping staff.

Planning two setups changes the preparation. In September, check last year's attendance records for the size of the December overtime peak. In October, write the packing and labelling steps on one page each. Before the season, have people from other departments and part-timers do those tasks once, and add whatever tripped them up to the page. Build the busy-season shift as a separate table from the normal one, decide in advance who covers which task, and put it on the shared calendar.

With that done, there is far less discussion of "who do we ask for what" once the season begins. The usual staff can spend their time on the work that needs judgement and on answering newcomers' questions.

Summary

A busy season that comes every year is a predictable shortage. Getting through it on overtime and borrowed staff alone concentrates the load on the same people and moves them toward the overtime caps. Estimate the peak from last year's attendance, break the extra work into pieces others can take, and decide the busy-season setup separately from the normal one. Starting two or three months ahead makes the season itself calmer.

APOUL's consultations also cover breaking down work and tidying attendance and handover records (open from 1 November 2026). For questions that need a labour-law judgement, please consult a licensed labour and social security attorney (sharoushi).