Summer Fridays Gain Traction With Employers

What are summer Fridays?

Summer Fridays are a type of flexible scheduling that allows employees to leave the office early or take the day off at the end of the week. As the name suggests, this flexible workplace option occurs during the summer and applies only to Fridays. 

Many employers offer summer Fridays to attract and retain top talent. It’s a coveted perk for job seekers and a valuable morale booster for current employees, whether they work in the office or remotely. A lighter work schedule on Fridays during the summer helps employees recharge, tend to personal obligations, enjoy the weather and disconnect from their work life. As a result, workers gain a more positive work-life balance, which can boost company morale and improve productivity throughout the organization. 

Types of summer Friday schedules 

Summer Fridays can be tailored to your organization’s needs. Consider the following ways to implement this schedule in your workplace: 

• Half-day summer Fridays: Offer employees the afternoon off, especially when the weather is nice.
• Monthly summer Fridays: Provide one summer Friday each month, giving employees a break without significantly hurting productivity.
• Biweekly summer Fridays: Strike a summer Friday balance by offering this perk every other week. 
• Contingent summer Fridays: Offer summer Fridays based on your business’s current workload, ensuring they occur during lighter periods.
• Light summer Fridays: Implement lighter workloads on Fridays during the summer to reduce stress as employees head into the weekend.
• Shifted-schedule summer Fridays: Allow employees to work extra hours earlier in the week to enjoy reduced hours on Fridays. 

What are the benefits and challenges of summer Fridays?

Summer Fridays have significant upsides, but they also bring some challenges.

Benefits

• Summer Fridays boost morale. Low workplace morale can significantly hurt operations, so keeping employees happy is a worthy goal. Summer Fridays are an enjoyable incentive that’s sure to boost morale.
• Summer Fridays help avoid burnout. Summer Fridays are a way to combat workplace burnout and ensure team members continue to contribute productively to your business.
• Summer Fridays can improve performance. Employees will look forward to summer Fridays and often work harder earlier in the week. Workers are often motivated by rewards, and summer Fridays can be viewed as a reward for getting through the workweek.
• Summer Fridays can reduce turnover. When hard work is rewarded with extra time off, employees are more likely to stay at a company, thereby reducing employee turnover and the costs of hiring new team members.

Challenges

• Summer Fridays are difficult to implement. For businesses with diverse departments or hourly employees, implementing summer Fridays can be challenging. It may benefit some teams but not others, and hourly workers may be concerned about reduced income.
• Summer Fridays can affect the bottom line. For some sectors, like publishing and advertising, Fridays during summer are generally less productive than the rest of the week, so Summer Fridays make sense. In others, Fridays may be busy and summer months may have crucial deadlines. In those cases, Summer Fridays aren’t practical; in fact, they’d hurt your bottom line. For example, restaurants likely wouldn’t want to close or be short-staffed on Fridays. 

How do I implement a summer Friday program?

If you think summer Fridays would suit your team and business, take these steps to create and implement a summer Friday program. 

1. Set your Friday work hours and schedules.

Summer Friday policies can vary significantly, even within a single company. Some team members might get one Friday off while others work, and then swap the following week. Alternatively, your entire team might leave early every Friday afternoon. Research the models used by other companies to find the best approach for your team.

2. Change your Monday-to-Thursday work hours as needed.

Maybe you can’t afford to lose eight hours of work every week but you really want to give your employees Fridays off. In that case, consider offering a compressed work schedule, such as a four-day workweek. Your employees would work 10 hours each day, Monday through Thursday. That adds up to 40 hours per week, so your team can take Fridays off without losing the eight hours of productivity.

3. Make the appropriate schedule changes in your payroll software.

Let’s say you’re switching to four-day, 40-hour workweeks to introduce summer Fridays. To implement this schedule, you must update your time-tracking and payment procedures accordingly. The best payroll services make it easy for you to alter your parameters and, for example, process pay for 10 hours of work on Monday through Thursday and none on Friday. 

Your payroll processor and HR professionals must ensure employees are paid correctly and on time, as well as account for overtime pay when necessary. 

4. Add your summer Friday policy to your employee handbook. 

Summer Fridays work best when you commit to them in writing as you would with any other policy. That means detailing the rules in your employee handbook, alerting employees to the new policy and asking them to acknowledge it.

Your summer Friday policy should clearly state the time of year when the schedule is active. For example, you could set your policy to apply from Memorial Day through Labor Day. Your policy should also explain how summer Fridays will affect your team’s hours the other days of the week. Be sure to note that the policy is subject to change if summer Fridays pose challenges to your team’s productivity and your company’s bottom line.

5. Adjust the policy as needed.

Let’s say you let your team stop working at 1:30 p.m. every Friday during the summer. However, client feedback reveals that lower-quality work is being received, indicating that your employees may be rushing their tasks. 

In this situation, you may need to review and change your policy to ensure employees have ample time to complete their work and customers aren’t shortchanged. You may need to alternate summer Fridays among team members or try a different setup that allows all work to be completed promptly and with the highest quality. It’s also a good idea to proactively review your policy. That will allow you to identify potential problems and adjust your setup before the consequences become severe.

Additionally, consider conducting employee surveys to gather feedback and see how your summer Friday policy is being received. Are summer Fridays serving their intended purpose? Are employees taking advantage of them? Do they still feel capable of fulfilling their responsibilities in a quality way? If not, your program should be adjusted accordingly.

Of course, notify all employees immediately if you change your summer Friday policy. 

6. Encourage your team to utilize your summer Friday policy.

Employees don’t always give themselves enough time off, but as an employer, you can help change that. Encourage your team to take time off and embrace summer Fridays so they take advantage of healthy time away from work. When you make summer Fridays a priority, your team won’t feel like they’re slacking off or being lazy. They’ll realize their employer cares about their work-life balance and genuinely wants them to take advantage of the opportunity for extra personal time. 

Why did summer Fridays gain popularity?

Summer Fridays aren’t new. In fact, they started in New York in the 1960s, when businesses such as ad agencies let employees take Fridays off to beat the summer heat and avoid traffic on their way out of town. 

However, this perk also gained traction during the COVID-19 pandemic, as professionals sought more workplace flexibility and a more positive work-life balance. Today, newer businesses and companies catering to Gen Z and millennial employees implement this perk to compete for talented team members in a competitive job market. 

In the past, a fear of being fired made many employees reluctant to take advantage of their rightful time off. However, in today’s climate, employers encourage team members to take advantage of perks such as summer Fridays and utilize their vacation time. A happy, well-rounded and well-rested team is a win-win for employers and employees. 

Are summer Fridays right for your business?

Depending on your industry and budget, summer Fridays might be a feasible perk that will boost employees’ loyalty and even improve their performance by allowing them the necessary downtime to recharge. 

Additionally, because this perk is limited to one season, it’s a more affordable option than many other employee benefits. Simply encouraging your workers to take the day or the afternoon off can do wonders for your company culture. 

Sammi Caramela contributed to this article.