June 21 officially marks the beginning of summer. Offices are emptying, temperatures are rising and patios are filling up.
A Captivate Network study found that during the summer months, 45% of employees report being more distracted and work productivity often drops by 20%.
This year also marks a decrease in health restrictions and people want to take advantage of it to travel. An Amex Trendex study found that 76% of respondents plan to travel more than they did in 2021.
There’s a lot going on in the summer, so we’ve got you covered!
To avoid a big drop in engagement and productivity within your teams, here are some ways to keep employees happy and engaged during summer.
1. Create Summer Hours
Be flexible. Give your team the option of starting later or leaving work earlier. Allow them to block off a Monday or Friday to enjoy a long weekend with family or friends. Give them the opportunity to telecommute more often.
And if you’re worried about setting a bad example for the rest of the year or losing productivity again, take heart. In fact, another study found that 66% of employees who work during summer hours feel more productive, not less.
Time to show them your confidence and encourage them to work smarter, not longer.
2. Encourage new activities during the weekends
Encourage your team to try new activities with their family, friends, or colleagues over the weekend. This helps to stimulate creativity, fuel conversations among colleagues, and inspire each other. You can also allocate a budget for summer activities per employee.
Give everyone ten minutes on the first call of the week on Monday to talk about what they did over the weekend. This will allow your team to feel that they are motivated to do things that make them happy and relaxed on the weekend. This will boost the happiness and productivity of your employees during the week.
Here are some examples of activities your employees could try on the weekends: Beach volleyball, discovering a new place to hike, outdoor yoga, mini-golf, reading a new book, electric bike ride, trying a new recipe, surfing, scuba diving, paddle boarding, eating a new flavor of ice cream, and much more.
Need more inspiration? Get more ideas here
3. Focus on well-being
Well-being at work should be nurtured always but even more so in the summer.
After a long year employees usually feel the need to relax. Go in their direction and make wellness the focus of summer in your company.
Give your team new ideas on how they can take care of themselves
• Offer weekly yoga classes in the office
• Encourage meditation or walking between meetings
• Give your employees access to online fitness and wellness videos/classes.
• Set up a wellness challenge for the summer months. There’s no better way to motivate yourself to be healthy than to do it as a team!
4. Foster Friendly Competition
Re-energize your team and make the atmosphere in the office more fun than usual. Engage your employees in a different way by organizing mini-challenges every week and offer small rewards for the winners.
• Veggie eating challenge
• Push-ups challenge
• Self-care challenge
• Creativity challenge
• or any other ideas
Go even further by including these challenges into a bigger team-building challenge, it will help build relationships within departments and company-wide, strengthens the company culture and develop employee engagement.
This summer, instead of asking employees to choose between having fun and working, help them do both. They’ll work better if they’re free to go for a walk with their kids, end up their day earlier for a barbecue or take 2 hours off to do yoga.
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