A designer on your team is about to go on leave. Parental leave, a medical situation, a sabbatical they've earned after six years of good work. Doesn't matter which. You're now facing the same question every manager faces at this moment: do we find someone to cover this role, or do we just... absorb it?

Most companies absorb it. Not because it's the smart move, but because finding temporary coverage feels like a hassle, and the work seems survivable in the short term. I want to walk through what the research actually says about that choice, because it's more lopsided than most people assume, and the honest answer isn't quite what either the "always backfill" staffing agencies or the "just power through it" managers want it to be.

The cost of doing nothing isn't zero

When a role goes uncovered, the assumption is usually that the work gets picked up by the team. And in a loose sense, it does. But labor economists who study this closely have found something worth paying attention to: when a specialized team member is absent, the work doesn't just get redistributed evenly. It often just doesn't get done, especially when that person's contribution was complementary to what everyone else does rather than interchangeable with it.

A designer on a small team is a good example of this. If you have one UX designer and they're out for three months, the developers on your team can't simply absorb design work the way they might cover for a missing project manager. The skill isn't transferable in that direction. So the work either stalls, gets done poorly by someone without the training for it, or piles up for the designer to face when they return.

That last part matters more than people think. There's real data on what happens to employees who come back from leave to a mountain of backlog: resentment builds, and it builds quietly. In some studies, employees moved into different responsibilities after a leave (rather than back into their original role with support) left the company within two years at dramatically higher rates. If you want someone to actually come back and stay, part of that is making sure their return isn't a punishment.

There's also a well-documented effect on whoever absorbs the workload in the meantime. A UK study of healthcare staff who were redeployed to cover gaps found significantly higher rates of burnout and a much higher likelihood they were applying to jobs outside the organization. People who get quietly loaded up with extra responsibility during someone else's leave don't usually complain about it in real time. They just start looking elsewhere.

None of this is controversial among people who study workplace behavior. What's less agreed upon is what you should actually do about it.

Hiring "someone, anyone" to cover isn't the fix

Here's where I want to be straight with you, because most articles like this are written by staffing companies trying to sell you a body to fill a seat, and I don't think that's honest.

Bringing in an outside person to cover a role has its own well-documented risks. Management researchers have found that blending temporary workers into a permanent team can strain relationships, and that temp workers often get left out of the informal knowledge sharing that makes teams effective in the first place. If you hire someone to cover a role and your team doesn't loop them into the conversations, the meetings, and the context that actually matter, you've paid for coverage without getting the value of it.

There's an even more specific problem for design work. Ramp-up time for a specialist role, particularly a creative one, tends to run somewhere between three months and a full year before someone is producing at their real capacity. A parental leave is often three to six months. Do the math on that. If you hire a generalist contractor who needs months to learn your product, your users, and your design system, they might just be hitting their stride right as the person they're covering for walks back in the door. You'll have paid for coverage that arrived too late to actually help.

This is the part that gets left out of most "just hire a temp" advice, and it's the reason a lot of companies try backfilling once, have a mediocre experience, and swear off it entirely. The problem usually wasn't the idea. It was the fit.

What actually works

The research points toward something fairly specific: coverage works when the person stepping in doesn't need to learn the craft, only the context. Someone who already knows UX deeply, who has done this kind of work across a range of products and industries, and who just needs a couple of weeks to understand your users, your patterns, and your team's rhythm, can be productive almost immediately instead of six months from now.

That's a very different proposition than posting a generic contract role and hoping for the best. It's also different from asking your engineering team to muddle through wireframes for a quarter. The goal isn't to replace the person who's out. It's to make sure the work doesn't stall and the person doesn't come back to a disaster.

A few things tend to separate coverage that actually works from coverage that becomes its own headache: