Rescue Summer Productivity with Flex Work

It’s not just you, it really is chilly in the office, and no, it’s not just the oddly cold, year-round office temperatures everyone’s talking about. It’s your company’s productivity that’s cooling down.

Every summer, while the sun beats down on the faces of those privileged enough to be outdoors, summertime envy beats down the motivation and energy of those still stuck inside the office. Days drag, meetings feel painfully longer than normal, unplanned absenteeism spikes and that eight-second rule for attention spans rings truer than ever.

Can you really blame employees, though, for daydreaming about cool beverages on a sunny beach while they’re blankly staring at screens? It’s up to you, leaders, managers and bosses, to lead your pack onward with creative incentives for engagement and focus.

But not everyone can afford to step away from deadlines and quotas for team building retreats, summer hours and half days. Your best bet to keep the ship moving at full speed without spending anything: offer telecommuting.

Free your employees from their cubicles this summer. Let them soak up sun from the rooftop of a coworking space, plow through projects by the pool, join online meetings from the hammock on their porch or work from their family’s lake house. When you satisfy the wants and needs of your community of workers, distractions subside and focus returns.

Flexible work options like telecommuting are proven to enhance employee engagement, improve productivity and increase worker retention. In fact, telecommuting even just one or two days a week this summer provides your employees with time for more creative and critical thinking tasks that often get disrupted by noise in the office.

Roughly 79 percent of workers around the world already commute one day each week, according to respondents in the 2015 PGi Global Telework Survey Report. The most popular number of days to work outside the office: just between two and three days.

What this means is, even just a hybrid of telecommuting and in-office work is enough to reap all of the benefits of flexible work and to diminish summer distractions. With the right communication and collaboration tools to keep remote workers connected, you’ll boost morale without losing speed, teamwork and results.

Between email, video conferencing, cloud-based project management, chat and other technologies, every office is practically a digital workspace anyways. Take advantage of the robust mobility and connectivity at your fingertips to make this your employees’ best and most productive summer ever at work—no matter where that is.

For more trends driving the future of collaboration like telecommuting, download our free eBook “The Future of Business Collaboration: 2015 Edition.”