How HR can motivate employees in the summer

The summertime is a period of holidays and seizing every opportunity to work outside, where a more relaxed pace seems to settle over the workplace. However, Human Resources and line managers are often tasked with finding ways to ensure momentum towards business goals are not lost. Below, we explore some methods for ensuring your people are able to enjoy the brief bliss of summer, while still remaining realistic about their professional targets.

Environment

Often, the lure of the sunshine is what can play a significant role in employees lacking motivation. Therefore, ensuring the environment your people spend most of their working day in is comfortable is crucial to minimising dissatisfaction. Ensure offices provide sources for hydration, air conditioning, and has a dress code that is considerate of any heatwaves. Organising some work associated activities or meetings to take place outside can also serve as a mood-booster for employees missing the sunshine. If there are severe heatwaves in your area, you may want to consider implementing a work-from-home plan for those who may have long, hot commutes, while still having the office available to those who want to make the most of its air-con.

Since the normalisation of hybrid and remote work due to the pandemic, some organisations have chosen to implement a Work-From-Anywhere strategy. This requires some leg work in terms of payroll, benefits, and other applicable regulations, but it may be the perfect fit for your organisation’s culture and turn out to contribute positively to employee engagement year-round – not just in the summer.

Flexible Working Benefits for Employees

Flexible working arrangements have been linked by the CIPD to improved talent attraction, well-being, engagement, loyalty, satisfaction, and absenteeism. Flexibility looks different for every organisation. Below are a few examples of how you may choose to make your workplace more flexible for your people this summer:

Child-care employee benefits

The school summer holidays often have parents and guardians scrabbling to sort out a schedule where their children are well cared for without sacrificing all of their annual leave. This can understandably cause stress, especially for single parents, parents of children with disabilities, or parents without a family support network nearby.

Employers can help provide childcare in different ways. This can include an on-site childcare facility, contracting directly with a provider, childcare vouchers, or reimbursing working parents for the cost of childcare. Ensure you research the regulations and rules behind each option so that your organisation can choose the best option for their workforce.

Benefits of Summer Hours for Employees

Summer hours can be a valuable way to show appreciation for your employee’s hard work and boost morale. A summer hours policy can contribute to a culture of work-life balance, where employees are productive and energised during their working hours, knowing they’ve got some extra time to enjoy the sun.

There are many kinds of summer hours, such as Friday’s off, Friday half-days, staggered Fridays off, and Fridays off with compressed hours. Read our article on summer hours to learn all the full details.

Hybrid & Remote work

Offering various work models based on individual employee needs can be a great way to improve your employer brand and make your organisation a more inclusive place to work. While these policies may work well seasonally, they have also seen great success with many organisations year-round. Therefore, summer may be a good opportunity to trial a hybrid and remote working policy, so that you have the chance to collect positive data and results to take to C-Suite and evidence for the policy becoming permanent.

You may be interested to read about How HR software Empowers Remote Working.

Learning and Development

The summer months can be a great mid-year chance to recap on your employee’s performance so far and discuss what they would like to achieve in the later half of the year. This can be good timing to explore what areas your people would like to upskill in or passion projects they are keen to get stuck into. These can refresh workplace motivation, as your people will not only feel listened to, but also have something new and exciting to dedicate their time to.

Implementing an employee performance management software during these discussions can greatly enhance the effectiveness of these evaluations. Such software provides structured feedback, goal tracking, and a comprehensive overview of each employee’s progress, ensuring that every team member is on the right track towards their personal and professional goals.

You may choose to adjust your entire performance and development strategy to revolve around employees having the opportunity to pursue new qualifications and projects in the summer months as well as the festive new year period – where our social media poll found lack of motivation to be even more significant than the summer!

Learn more about the xcd Learning & Development module.

Overall, the summertime can be less of an obstacle for employers and embraced as an opportunity to show recognition of their employee’s hard work and re-invigorate morale. Flexibility, progression, and a well-equipped environment are a few of the ways HR teams can improve employee motivation during the summer months.