The summer holidays are nearly upon us. This is the time for vacations, outdoor bar-be-ques, traveling, sun, and fun. Today, corporate culture is forgiving of summer vacations, usually from around July 4th through mid-August. The time is now to gear your employees up between their vacation times.
Corporate culture is something that has to be worked on constantly. Summer vacations are great for employee engagement and work culture more many reasons and should be encouraged. The consequence of letting employees go on vacation every summer is that you have precious little time to pass on important communications and generally check in on them.
Employee Engagement Between Vacation Times
Every company’s vacation and time-off policy is different, along with every employee’s schedule, so building in time to communicate and head off issues in the future can be challenging. I’m assuming most employees take time off in the summer, for example. While most employees do indeed use the summer time more often to take vacation (for various reasons, such as kids are out of school, better time to travel, workload is lessened, etc.), your communication systems have to be able to deliver messages during the season. When business slows down, your employees have to still be in the loop.
Keeping employees is a central internal branding and corporate culture concept. Only with consistent communications can employee engagement flourish; only when employee engagement flourishes can corporate culture bloom alongside it.
Open Enrollment
It’s never too early to start thinking about open enrollment and which benefits and insurance programs to sign up for. Employees can brush off open enrollment talk for a while, but before they know it, they’ll be staring down the deadline. You can make the enrollment process easier now by starting to remind employees to review their health insurance plans. A company focus on health and insurance can ease anxiety—especially this year, when health insurance seems filled with uncertainty and doubt—by building corporate culture around health and health care choices, at least somewhat.
If you look at the calendar, open enrollment is a few months away, but by the time everyone is back in the fold after their various summer vacations, you’ll be close to the deadline. Ease stress by being annoying now, and your employees will be better prepared when the time comes.
Employee Communication Programs and Systems
In anticipation of open enrollment and vacation times, your video communications and decision-support tools should be dialed in for your employees, too. Video content can help shed light on common issues like health insurance, time-off procedures, employee onboarding (recruiting and onboarding in the summer is convenient sometimes), and more.
Employees might not be using your decision support tools just yet, but you should test them and make sure they work before open enrollment rolls around.
Preparing your employees for difficult decisions that will directly affect their workplace happiness and performance is the best thing you could do during a summer lull.
