Summer has arrived. Even the minds of the most dedicated employees will wander, perhaps a bit more often than is the case during other times of the year.
Your business may already have casual Fridays. What you might want to consider is doing something a bit beyond casual Fridays during the summertime. Consider launching Summer Fridays.
Summer Fridays can take different forms. You can allow your employees the ability to leave early on Summer Fridays. You an even consider giving them the entire day off through a Summer Fridays program.
Naturally, as a serious business owner, you will want to know how Summer Fridays will impact your business overall and benefit your employees. A growing number of businesses of different types offer some type of Summer Fridays program. There have been five key benefits identified with Summer Fridays.
Improve Employee Morale
Naturally, a major reason for implementing Summer Fridays is to enhance overall employee morale. Research into existing Summer Fridays programs reveals that this type of benefit significantly improves employee morale. The net effect of improved employee moral is enhancement in other areas as well. These include improved collaboration and improved self esteem. In addition, across the board, employees nearly always become more engaged at work when a company implements a Summer Fridays program.
Increased Productivity
You may wonder how giving employees part of all of Friday off during the summertime will impact productivity. Muse conducted an interesting study which revealed that 25 percent of employees confirm that they feel less productive during the summer months.
68 percent of employees maintain that they experience a higher level of daydreaming on the job in the summertime. Many employees make no bones about a desire tot be outside rather than at work in the summer.
Summer Fridays appears to effectively, directly address these productivity killing issues. Despite employees working fewer hours when a Summer Fridays program is implemented, productivity increases to compensate for that lost work time.
In addition, Summer Fridays provide something of a valuable carrot for the future. Employees will understand that if they want to keep Summer Fridays going forward into the future, it is important to keep productivity high. This provides them an intrinsic incentive to work efficiently on those days when they are at work.
Elevated Employee Retention
Like other business owners, you certainly keep your eyes open when it comes to recruiting the best talent for your enterprise. However, you most definitely want to retain your existing, talented team.
Of course, good pay is fundamental to employee retention. However, the menu of perks your company offers to team members is vital to employee retention.
The reality is that when it comes to perks, your business is competing with what other enterprises are doing. As mentioned earlier, a growing number of businesses are offering some type of Summer Fridays program for their employees.
As the number of millennials advance in the workforce, creative perks become more important. These workers are apt to switch jobs more readily that was the case with prior generational cohorts. Thus, if they can obtain a benefit like Summer Fridays somewhere else, even when pay is comparable, they may depart your company.
Solid Work and Personal Life Balance for Employees
The importance of a meaningful balance between work and personal life cannot be understated. 53 percent of workers indicate that a balance between work and their personal lives is very important to them.
Family activities tend to increase in the summertime, and significantly so. In addition, any people in the United States enjoy traveling in the summer time. Summer Fridays provides a mechanism through which your own employees are better able to strike a healthy balance between work and personal life.
As an important aside, there are identifiable benefits to the workplace when a better balance is struck between work and the personal lives of employees. For example, the rate of employee burnout appears to lessen.
Reduce Operating Expenses
Many businesses are slower on Fridays during the summer months. Thus, by closing down part or all of the day, you actually save money on different operating costs, like the power associated with air conditioning.
An alternative to a full day off on Summer Fridays, you can also consider allowing your team the opportunity to work remotely. This also will lessen operating costs.
Conclusion
As presented here, there are a number of important benefits that can be realized through Summer Friday. With that said, you don’t want to initiate such a program on a whim. You need to undertake due diligence.
In advance of embarking on Summer Fridays, you need to evaluate how giving workers off for some or all of the day on Friday will impact clients or customers. You also need to consider the potential impact Summer Fridays may have on vendors and other stakeholders associated with your business.
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Jessica is a professional blogger who writes for Faxage, a leading company that provide Internet fax service services for individuals and businesses.
