Is your organisation missing a trick by failing to maximise the opportunities summer offers? it might sound paradoxical to suggest the quietest months of the year are the best time to revitalise corporate activity but canny C-suites use this time to focus on developing team performance, strategic planning and ensuring that employee engagement is fully topped up.
For example, the summer slowdown is the perfect time to initiate some new flexi-time structures. Try out four-day work weeks – or even remote only fortnights – to see if they boost operational resilience. Exploring your workforce planning in imaginative ways can give your team a sense that you’re working with them, not experimenting on them! This reduces stress and gives them a sense of belonging that carries forward into the fourth quarter and beyond.
Consider a strategy retreat for those employees who normally only get strategy trickle-down. Those who are front-line, customer-facing, entry level etc rarely get the opportunity to really see how strategy is shaped. A day or two where they get to role-play C-suite, to analyse market trends, consider growth plans and risk and align priorities with business need can get them to invest in your strategy in a completely new and more committed way.[1]
Mid-year reviews spark superlative business planning
There is something about using your summer as a reset option that delivers a different kind of result – it allows you to take more time, give a different, more relaxed focus and become more speculative about what the immediate future may hold. This in turn allows you to:
- Reflect on progress more deeply
- Re-align goals and make sure you’re communicating them with energy and integrity
- Adjust leadership strategy that you might have been using without adequate assessment.
Identifying business gaps before they become problems is a summer ‘must do’
Whether it is recruitment gaps, training gaps or information black holes, summer is a fantastic time to look at what you might not have, and what you need to do to get it. Summer strategic planning can cover:
- Optimising internal processes – how are your onboarding processes actually going? Are your 360° reviews really working?
- Up-skilling teams – check your AI training is comprehensive and up-to-date, for example
- Checking metrics – are you measuring what really matters? Summer may be a good time to engage with key clients and partners to sound out what they value (or don’t) about your organisation through a tick box based survey or telephone calls to get rich data that can inform your KPIs for the year ahead.
Focus on focus for better business performance
Resetting your operations, focus, and goals so that you’re proactive rather than reactive is a useful tool for any executive as it models this behaviour for your team. Research shows that productivity declines by up to 20% in the summer months and employee distraction is half again as likely as at other times of year – so a reset can be a vital tool for your own performance.[2]
Once you’ve taken that opportunity to reset for yourself, make sure you’re cascading it down to your team, whether through one-to-one meetings, annual reviews, or just giving them time and space to examine and engage with their own focus and goals. They can then use the quieter summer months to support business growth and their own growth, which brings them into the fourth quarter with maximum focus and commitment.
Sources
[1] https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2024/06/18/20-ways-business-leaders-can-make-the-most-of-a-slow-summer-season/
[2] https://www.personneltoday.com/hr/summer-slump-teams/
