Many companies try to give their employees a little reprieve while positioning themselves as a caring employer by offering employees “summer hours.” Usually, “summer hours” means half-days on Friday or even Fridays off every other week. That’s a great way for an employer to dip their toe in the flexibility pool and experiment with offering flexible work options, but sticking with summer hours might be limiting both the employer and employee.
When I worked at McGladrey, we started out in 2005 with a summer hours policy and eventually moved to no policy. It was too prescriptive to say we’re closing at noon on Friday – both for our employees AND our business needs. Plus, it undermined the commitment we had to flexibility throughout the remainder of the year.
Instead, we migrated to a new approach that encouraged people to utilize flexibility to take a little extra time in the summer–whenever was right for them and the business.
I think summer hours make a great pilot project for flex, but firms need to think differently about Friday closures if they want to reap the true business benefits.
We shouldn’t assume that Friday afternoons are the best time-off option. It might not be the best break time for every employee or every business unit.
If your company is doing well with summer hours, take the next step by eliminating the formal Friday-afternoons-off policy to create a more integrated approach to flex and use summer as the launch pad for the effort.
Summer is a great time to encourage people to rejuvenate and take some extra time away from the office, but you don’t necessarily need a prescribed day to make that happen.
Instead, companies should foster the message that flexible scheduling is an integrated part of how work gets done.
What would you think about eliminating formal summer hours in your office? Would you still be able to take the time away?
- Teresa Hopke
LMW, SVP
Great job Teresa. I couldn’t have said it better: “Summers are a great time to encourage people to rejuvenate and take some extra time away from the office, but you don’t necessarily need a prescribed day to make that happen.” There are so many different ways employees can do this and meet business needs alongside their personal goals. We get people thinking about this as early as March or April at ThirdPath Institute. Thanks for encouraging more people and organizations to think outside the box.
Sounds great. I love the flexibility that I have in my role and position. The challenge at my company is that in addition to the office workers, we also have a manufacturing facility. They don’t get to work flexible hours, and often they are working 6+ days a week.
How do you balance fairness when the office workers get flexibility and reduced summer hours while the manufacturing workers are mandated to work overtime?
There are two parts to your question. First, fairness is about enabling everyone to have access to some sort of flexibility based on a set of business-based criteria including an individual’s job performance, needs of the business, nature of the position, etc. At Life Meets Work, we believe strongly that some sort of flex can be available for every position, it just takes some creativity.
For manufacturing employees, hourly workers and others whose jobs require them to be onsite, organizations are using all sorts of flex arrangements that, at times, look different from those of their professional counterparts.
Those strategies include 4/10′s (4, ten-hour shifts), shift swapping, floaters, schedule predictability (at least a week’s notice of an employee’s schedule), and mandatory overtime notice (alerting a subset of your employees to the week that they will be “on call” for mandatory overtime).
You can learn more details about these and other types of flex for hourly workers (starting on page 30) at http://www.worklifelaw.org/pubs/ImprovingWork-LifeFit.pdf