Using “Summer Hours” to Motivate Employees

By Karen Axelton

Does your business use “summer hours” to motivate or reward employees? A summer hours program, where employees enjoy shortened or altered workweeks during the summer months to give them more free time, can be a great way to make your staff happier and more productive with no cost to your business.

More productive, you say? How can that be when my employees are working shorter hours? Well, first of all, summer hours don’t necessarily involve a shorter workweek. Many companies add time on to the rest of the days of the week so that employees can leave early on Fridays, or have every other Friday off.

Even if you don’t take this approach, and you actually give your employees every other Friday off or every Friday afternoon off, you’re likely to find that employees are supercharged to get their work done before that magical Friday hour approaches. Consider the old saying “Work expands to fill the time available” and you’ll see why giving workers fewer hours often inspires them to make better use of the time they do have.

If you’re considering offering summer hours, here are some things to consider:

• What type of scheduling does your business need? Summer hours need to be offered to all employees equally. If that won’t work for you, then you need to figure out a different type of summer reward.
• How will you handle exceptions? Make it clear to employees that if an urgent or emergency situation arises, you might have to rescind summer hours one week.

Clearly, summer is well underway, but there’s still time to implement a plan for August—traditionally a slow time in many businesses. Tell your staff you are using August as a “test run” and if the plan works for your business, you will implement it in full next summer.

If you’re struggling with what type of summer schedule would work for your business, consider getting employees’ input—being on the front lines, they often have more insights into how to handle workflow.

Once you create your summer hours policy, be sure to communicate it to all employees so there are no misunderstandings. Make it clear that summer hours are a privilege, not a right, and that your policy will change back to standard hours if workers abuse the privilege.

Summer hours can be a great way to reward your staff, take some time off yourself and save money on utilities and other expenses.

Image by Flickr user Virtual Photography Studio (Creative Commons)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 19th, 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Small Business, small business, Workforce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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