Four Steps for Transitioning Your Business to Summer Work Hours
IN A HURRY? HERE’S THE BOTTOM LINE
Working a more relaxed summer schedule as a business owner takes four key steps. First, decide what your ideal schedule will look like. Next, work ahead on any responsibilities that can be completed in advance, such as marketing content creation. After that, you will need to strategically cull your meetings to the bare minimum. And finally, work with a qualified team to support your needs.
GOT A MINUTE? HERE ARE THE DETAILS TO CONSIDER
The sun is shining, and that deck chair is calling your name. Are you looking forward to reducing or flexing your work hours, this summer? Maybe you’re a parent and you need to accommodate your kids being home from school, or perhaps you live in a climate like Wisconsin, where we don’t get many warm months, and you want to enjoy them!
Unsurprisingly, people take more vacations in the summer, and office workers tend to work from home (or not at all!) on summer Fridays, according to Time Magazine. However, for business owners, we have to weigh reduced hours against the potential for reduced income.
So, how do you work a lighter summer schedule without compromising on sales and revenue? That’s the topic of today’s blog! We're going to talk about how to prepare your business to work a reduced schedule during the summer.
Set Intentions and Boundaries Around Summer Work Hours
Start by visualizing your ideal summer schedule. Would you like to work shorter days? Maybe you want to be available to your kids for their afternoon and evening summer activities, so you decide to be done with work at 2:00 p.m. every day.
Another idea is to consolidate your working time into four days instead of five. I know a lot of people in the corporate world will work four ten-hour days instead of five eight-hour days, in the summer, so they can have Fridays off. You could try that schedule, too, and enjoy three-day weekends all summer long.
Next, block off your vacation weeks for the months ahead. Block off that time now, so that you’re not faced with the dilemma of somebody scheduling a meeting when you had intended to be out of the office.
Work Ahead on Summer Responsibilities
What are some things that you can do now so that you don’t have to worry about them, over the summer? I like batching my work so that I am doing a bunch of similar tasks, all at once, so that I don’t have to worry about them for a while.
A great example is marketing activities. You don’t want to scale back on sales and marketing efforts over the summer, because that creates a feast and famine cycle in your business. Things could be going great heading into the summer, but don’t let your foot off the gas! You don’t want your pipeline to be empty when fall rolls around and you’re ready to work full-time, again. We must continuously feed our marketing channels.
You can pre-record podcast episodes, pre-write blogs, pre-write social media posts and get them scheduled, and much more. Imagine what it would feel like to have your whole summer’s worth of marketing content queued up and ready to go!
Clarify Your Summer Meeting and Communication Strategy
Decide which meetings you need to continue having throughout the summer. Which ones are absolutely critical? What do you need to prioritize? Keep open space for those meetings, such as sales calls and strategic collaborations.
Now, which meetings can you postpone? Maybe you normally reserve time for one-on-one networking, and you want to decrease the frequency of these in the summer. As you look at your summer schedule and reduce your hours, it’s important to be more choosy with how you spend your time. Meetings can take up a lot of time, so it’s important to be strategic.
Another way to reduce time spent in meetings is to shift to using communication tools like Loom and Voxer. My team uses both of these tools, and they cut down drastically on meetings and emails.
Lean on Your Team and Virtual Assistant for Summer Support
Let’s say you decided to take off every Friday this summer. Great! But now, you’re just spending every Thursday afternoon frantically clearing your plate for the weekend, and every Monday, you’re trying to dig yourself out from under a huge pile of emails. What was the point of that extra day off if you’re just going to have extra stress and work?
This is where having a team member like a virtual assistant can be really helpful in reducing that overall workload for you. Virtual assistants can help handle tasks like:
Scheduling and confirming appointments
Bookkeeping and expense tracking
Create content, monitor engagement, and schedule social media posts
Follow up with sales prospects
(That’s just a short list - here are 101 ways a Virtual Assistant can support you!)
Email inbox management comes in especially handy in the summer. Because I don’t work Fridays in the summer, my assistant monitors my email, handling things that can be filed, deleted, or responding to frequently asked questions or new inquiries from potential clients. Throughout the week - but especially when I’m out of the office - she keeps an eye on my inbox and keeps it clean for me. That makes going into my inbox on a Monday morning, after having a long weekend, so much easier and less time-consuming!
If you don't already have other team members who can back you up, now would be a great time to consider having that conversation. Once you find the right person to help you, working a reduced summer schedule becomes not only possible, but totally achievable!