Here’s a question that few managers ask themselves in July: what’s going on with my team during the summer?
According to ZestMeUp’s BaromEX, only 37% of employees say they are motivated to get up to go to work. Because disengagement does not take place in September. It is built silently, often in the summer, when the managerial link is weakened and no one is looking at the signals.
Summer is precisely your window to act before problems become visible. Lighter pace, clearer agendas, more accessible teams: rarely will you have so much space to gain height, recalibrate your priorities and build the foundation that will make the difference at the start of the school year.
1. Take your head out of the handlebars to reconsider your course
Always in reaction, never in anticipation? Summer is your chance to get out of it. Block out a few hours a week to ask yourself the real questions: where are you in relation to the objectives set in January? Has your market evolved? The expectations of your teams too? This time to step back is not a luxury, it is an investment. It’s better to adjust halfway than to realize in December that you’ve been running in the wrong direction.
2. Measure what matters, not everything that can be measured
The trap of many organizations: producing HR data without knowing what to do with it. THE completion rate interviews? An activity indicator. The reduction in turnover, the reduction in absenteeism, the level of motivation of the teams? Value indicators. The nuance is crucial. Summer is an opportunity to rethink your listening device. A well-configured monthly pulse, a quarterly barometer focused on the right levers, and you will arrive in September with actionable insights, not intuitions. Recognition, autonomy and interest in work are among the first levers of commitment: you might as well capture them before their erosion becomes a warning.
3. Make the link between your ambitions and the reality on the ground
The challenge for all managers: transforming a great strategy into concrete results. The OKR (Objectives & Key Results) method responds to this effectively. The principle: inspiring objectives, quantifiable key results. But the real question is not “do you have OKRs?”, it is “did your employees co-construct them?”. McKinsey documents it: involving teams in defining objectives creates a level of buy-in that top-down communication does not produce. An employee who participates in defining their objective no longer suffers from it: they take ownership of it and execute it with much more autonomy.
4. Let AI do the repetitive work.
You do human work. McKinsey documents it: middle managers spend less than 30% of their time actually managing their teams; almost half of their energy goes into individual execution and administrative tasks. It’s not a problem of willpower, it’s a problem of charge. This is where intelligent use of AI is a game changer. Not buzzword AI, but a concrete operational lever: analysis of verbatims, recommendations generated from the results, detection of weak signals before they become visible. These tools do not replace the manager’s judgment: they free up time for what only he can do, the difficult conversation, the right feedback, the substantive decision. Summer is the time to make them your own: whoever masters them in July arrives in September with a head start.
5. Create a bond before the pressure of going back to school
Paradoxically, summer is often the time for the most exchanges rich with your colleagues. The light pace creates a rare availability: that of a real conversation, without urgency which short-circuits everything. Take the opportunity to take the real temperature: on vision, what works, what slows down. A team breakfast, a more relaxed monthly meeting, a one-on-one meeting without an agenda. These moments build the trust that makes teams resilient when the rhythm picks up. And if you have continuous listening in place, you’ll get there with data, not guesswork.
Conclusion: you will be that manager who transforms moments of calm into a competitive advantage.
