How Work Is Now Different in the Summer

What even is work like in the summer anymore?

For many white-collar workers, the days are gone when they had clearly delineated five-day workweeks in the office interrupted by “summer Fridays” and a few weeks of vacation in July or August. That’s been replaced by year-round flexible scheduling, work from home, meeting-free Fridays, mental-health days off throughout the year, blending of work travel and vacations, overlap between vacation travel and work, and so on.

“It used to be a ‘summer Friday’ was an exceptional thing,” says Alexia Cambon, a senior director of research at Microsoft. “Now, flexibility is pretty normalized. It’s not something that you have to ask permission for. It’s not something you have to earn. It’s not something you have to get to a certain level to deserve… As a result, maybe ‘summer Fridays’ aren’t so exceptional.”

We set out to understand how these practices have reshaped what work looks like during the summer as opposed to the rest of the year. Here’s what we found:

• Office attendance drops during summer months, but it does also at other points in the year. We analyzed the past 15 months of New York City office attendance data from Kastle, a security company that tracks card swipes at offices across the country. Attendance was lower during some weeks last summer, particularly the week of July 4 and during a steady slump between the end of July and Labor Day. August 2023 had the lowest average level of attendance out of any month in the data set, at 41.6% of pre-pandemic attendance. But attendance figures for June and July hovered around the annual average of 47.6%, aside from the week of Independence Day. The summer slump was dwarfed by an even more drastic decline in office attendance during the winter months, between Thanksgiving and the first weeks of the new year. Between November 15, 2023 and January 17, 2024, average attendance was 42.7% of pre-pandemic averages.

Chart by Charter · Data from Kastle Systems

• US workers are taking more paid time off during the summer months. Last summer, the number of workers who took vacations during the summer rebounded past pre-pandemic levels, according to the Current Population Survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. During the summer months of June, July, and August 2023, an average of 5.4 million full-time workers reported that they missed part of their previous work week due to a vacation or personal day, a 6% increase from 5.1 million in 2019 (the full-time labor force increased just over 2% during that same time period.)

Chart by Charter · Data from Bureau of Labor Statistics

• Americans are traveling more during the summer. US Travel, an industry trade group, predicts that this year’s travel numbers will outpace that of last year’s. Josh Friedlander, US Travel’s vice president of research, points to multiple record-breaking travel days so far this summer, as measured by the number of TSA screenings, as well as surveys showing high levels of intentions to travel. It’s likely that many of these travelers will blend work and leisure during their trips—one-fourth of workers surveyed by talent-sourcing firm Howdy said they plan to take a “workcation” in 2024, and half of respondents who have a business trip in 2024 said they plan on turning their work travel into a “bleisure” trip, or blending business and leisure.
• “Summer Fridays” have become year-round flexible Fridays. Nearly one-fifth of workers report that their companies offer “summer Fridays,” where they have a shortened workday, according to a recent survey from Dayforce. But hybrid policies have given workers additional flexibility throughout the year. Since the beginning of 2022, Friday has consistently been the most popular day to work from home among hybrid workers, according to a recent update from WFH Research. In 2023, that was especially true between May and September. 

Source: WFH Research

• It might be soon to say. Researchers we spoke to warned against drawing too many conclusions from the limited amount of data we have. “​​Very anecdotally, our measures of work from home do seem to tick upwards in summer months, which would be consistent with seasonality,” Steven J. Davis, senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, told us. “But this is based on just a couple years of data so we can't confidently say that that's a robust trend.”

Experts we spoke with say summer work practices are still evolving. But it’s clear that flexibility is important beyond summertime. For Annie Dean, global head of Team Anywhere at Atlassian, trying to pinpoint one time of year when workers most need flexibility may miss the point. She gives the example of supporting working parents: “Speak to any parents in May, in December, in September, these frenetic months when there is performance after performance, or you're signing up everything for the new school year and handing in all the health forms, or you're trying to get through the holidays and support all the magical creatures that exist in our children's lives.”When it comes to crafting vacation policies, hybrid work arrangements, and outcomes-oriented performance evaluations, “it's not about a single policy,” she says, “but a way of operating every single day.”

Below, we've rounded up the best practices for flexibility, vacation, and performance policies that affect workers year-round.

Vacation policies and rest ethic

For Dayforce’s McClendon, part of the issue of “quiet vacationing” and “summertime slacking” is organizational culture around taking time off. “We know that employees don't always take advantage of things like vacation time,” she says. “We know employees will often say that they're too busy to take time off.”

• Team-wide days off. Organization- or team-wide mental health and wellbeing days can be an effective way to take the pressure off individual employees to carve out paid time off (PTO) amid a busy team calendar. “The appeal is that if everyone—even the boss—takes off, employees won’t feel pressured to work, and they won’t return to full inboxes,” my colleague Jacob Clemente wrote in our 2022 guide to company well-being days. In that piece, Tracy Brower, vice president of workplace insights at Steelcase, suggested giving two longer chunks of time over the course of the year, noting that a more spread-out approach might be more disruptive to teams’ workflows in a way that counterproductively adds stress. The guide also includes guidance on how to schedule team-wide days off, communicate policies internally and externally, and evaluate their effectiveness.
• PTO templates. Distribute a template for people to write their out-of-office plans and normalize sharing them in a shared channel (At Charter, we use a #pto-coverage channel in Slack.) Giving workers a starting point also removes some of the burden on individual employees who may be scrambling to wrap things up before departing, making it easier for them to capture everything in one spot.

💡 A few ideas for different structures to adapt:

• We like the suggestion shared by time-management coach Elizabeth Grace Saunders in the Harvard Business Review to have employees structure their work into three buckets: things they’ll do before signing off, things that should pause, and things to transfer to colleagues in their absence.
  
• GitLab’s employee guide to PTO includes a checklist of things for workers to take care of before they go, including informing colleagues and managers of vacation dates, setting out-of-office messages, updating the status on any shared calendar events, and noting who’s taking on which of their responsibilities that can’t wait until their return.

Ideally, members of the same team should all use the same format for their PTO plans, whatever that looks like, to make it easier to spot anything that may have fallen through the cracks. As you circulate your organization-wide template, encourage individual managers to discuss and tweak templates to suit workflows on the team level.

• Out-of-office (OOO) messages. Similarly, provide your employees a template for their OOO messages and a guide to setting them up.

💡 Here’s a template for you to adapt:

Hello,

I’m [on vacation/out of the office/taking time off for the holidays]. If you need to reach someone at our company urgently, you can email [email address here].

I will respond to all non-urgent matters when I return on [date].

At [company name] we encourage our staff to rest and recharge. Research shows that taking time off is essential to mental and physical well-being.

When I return I'll be more productive and creative, which is essential for our organization to succeed.

• PTO norms. Circulate and model guidelines to allow all team members to fully unplug. Consider creating a channel for sharing photos from PTO (Charter uses our #pto-pics channel), and encourage leaders to share their own pics. Encourage all employees to delete Slack and work email off their phones while they’re on vacation and encourage them to keep their OOO messages on for the first day after returning from a longer vacation to encourage a gradual return.
•  Normalize breaks throughout the day. In addition to supporting full days away from work, build in time for workers to rest and recharge throughout the workday. For example, Microsoft’s Cambon recommends setting the default meeting time to 25 or 50 minutes so that employees can take quick breaks between meetings. At Charter, we include “Taking a break ☕” as one of our default statuses on Slack to encourage colleagues to step away from their computer for 30 minutes.

Flexible work policies year round

• Evaluating flexible-work policies. The foundation of a successful hybrid-work strategy has three parts:
  • Flexibility: In types of space available at the office, in the activities you choose to bring people together, in how you can meet employee needs to make gathering possible.
  • Purpose: In why you’re gathering, in what’s going to happen when you do, in the decisions you make about location and timing.
  • Clarity: In your values and the activities that strengthen them, in your desired outcomes, in what your employees want and need to do their best work.

📖 What to read: Consider our guidance for rolling out a hybrid work strategy or FAQs for managers.

• Team-level agreements. Increase clarity on your team by creating a shared document detailing expectations and processes around hybrid schedules, communication mediums, and collaboration. Here are our guiding questions to discuss team-level agreements, and here is a template for the final document.
• Meeting-free days. One tactic we often write about to give employees more autonomy over their schedules is weekly team-wide meeting-free days.

💡 Here’s an example policy to circulate:

Focused Fridays: We discourage scheduling meetings on Fridays to enable team members to have distraction-free time to do focused work, to transition more easily to the weekend and to enable team members to take PTO on Fridays. We understand that sometimes there might be extraordinary circumstances that require a meeting to be scheduled on Fridays, and if that is the case, please discuss with all invitees before scheduling the meeting.

• Four-day workweeks. Whether your organization is considered shortened workweeks for the summer or permanently, our guide to transitioning to four-day workweeks can offer guidance as they grow in popularity. Read it for guidance on crafting new practices and norms, including coverage plans and team-level schedules, auditing meeting time, instituting coordination hours, and creating guardrails to protect focus time and time away from work.
• Coordination hours. Coordination hours can help individual workers exercise flexibility while carving out time for, well, coordination and collaboration.

 Also provide clarity for what hours inside and outside of the coordination block are to look like. For example, what are team-level expectations for sending and responding to messages and emails outside of coordination hours? How do workers communicate if they have to step away from their computer for an appointment, external meeting, or other obligation?

💡 Here’s an example of a policy to share:

Coordination Hours: Monday - Thursday 12-4pm ET. When team members across the company are expected to be available for meetings and time sensitive communication.

• Support for asynchronous work. Successful flexible-work policies often require colleagues to collaborate asynchronously, whether due to a colleague working from a different time zone or another catching up after hours due to a school function or doctor’s appointment. We’ve covered the best digital tools to facilitate asynchronous work, from screen-recording tools to audio-transcription tools, as well as strategies including how to craft asynchronous work plans and the importance of shared definitions of urgency.

Clear goals and outcomes year round

“When I think about setting up flexible work policies, I really think it's about designing for outcomes,” says Dean. That requires clarity for both individuals and teams on goals and outcomes. At Atlassian, that looks like a shared goals platform to understand every goal of the company and all of the projects that contribute to it.

Another exercise that can promote clarity for individuals is a role-charter exercise. Prompt team members to identify all projects, processes, decisions, and goals that they think or know they own. This should also include an overarching description of their role that includes expectations around working arrangements, so that any ambiguity is brought into the open. Then, circulate and discuss role charters as a group in order to clarify shared expectations and goals. Check out our template here.

©2024, Charter Works, Inc. This article is reprinted with permission from Charter Works, Inc. All rights reserved.