Reminding employees to take a summer vacation may be great for your company’s bottom line, HR experts say. Increasing flex time over the summer and encouraging employees to take vacation time can have a significant payoff for employers because it allows workers to get re-energized and return to work more engaged and productive.

Although the idea of “summer hours” is an old one, it is increasingly in fashion, and employers are also looking at other ways of helping employees recharge their batteries and spend time with families during the summer months. Some companies are even sitting down with employees and encouraging them to take vacation time—something that would have been unusual just a few years ago.

“We know the amount of vacation time that goes unused in this country is enormous,” says Kyra Cavanaugh, president of Life Meets Work, a Park Ridge, Illinois-based consulting firm.

“There are a number of studies that show the health benefit of taking vacation. So to encourage taking vacation in the summer, as part of an overall wellness strategy, some organizations are looking at PTO utilization and holding their employees accountable for putting summer vacation on the calendar.”

Summer flextime

It probably doesn’t take too much arm-twisting to get most employees to take their vacation days. But the old concept of “summer hours” also is getting a new look.

Many companies and HR departments have put a new emphasis on flextime hours for employees who need more flexibility due to family or other personal commitments.

It’s a strategy that many employers use year-round, but busy summer months are an especially good time for providing flexible work hours.

“All employees are hungry for more flexibility, regardless of age, regardless of gender,” says Lisa Horn, director of the Workplace Flexibility Initiative at the Society for Human Resources.

She pointed to The National Study of the Changing Workforce, a 30-year study of employee attitudes, which has found a growing desire among workers for flexibility.

“Four out of five employees say flexibility is either important or very important in their next job,” she says. “So if you’re an employer looking to recruit or retain your top talent and you don’t have flexibility, but your competitor down the street does—you can see that it’s in an employer’s interest to offer more flexibility.”

Horn added that there seems to be a national trend to respond to that demand. “Employers are more apt to offer these types of perks; flexibility with schedules, casual Fridays, or shortened summer hours,” she says. SHRM’s own National Survey of Employers found in 2014 an uptick in flex time offerings from employers.

Although switching to summer hours may not work for all industries and jobs, Horn says that areas such as information and technology-based companies are a good fit for more flex time in the summer.

She added that, as with any benefit, companies need to come up with well-written and well-communicated policies.

“It needs to be very clearly articulated,” she says. “You can avoid a lot of challenges with flex options in the summer and year-round, just by making sure everybody is clear on what the expectations are, both for the organization and the employee.”

Don’t just vacation—disconnect!

Cavanaugh says employees are not just being encouraged to go on vacation, they are also being encouraged to unplug—to leave emails and other digital reminders of the office behind.

“With everybody feeling overworked and stressed, and people feeling that they need to be attached to their devices 24/7, there are a number of organizations that encourage both taking summer vacation in the first place, and also encourage disconnecting,” she said.

The problem, she added, is defining what “disconnected” means. Being completely unplugged probably has the biggest health benefits, Cavanaugh says, but not everyone feels comfortable going that far.

“[Some people] feel better if they can at least check emails in the morning … or if they limit the number of days they’re checking,” she noted. “The important thing is that individuals are unplugging, however they define it, and that employers encourage employees to support each other on paid time off.”

Bringing people together—other ideas for summer fun

Cavanaugh said time off is not the only benefit that employers are looking at when trying to keep their employees engaged during the summer months.

“The other trend is around companies trying to bring back some of the team-building efforts that died out during the recession, when budgets were tighter,” she says.

“I’m hearing more about people trying to inject a little more fun into the workplace, especially in the summer.” She points to activities like company baseball games, office parties, or cooking contests as an important way to bring people together.  “We were really seeing that because of the amount of work that employees had, they stopped talking to each other, they stopped having fun—so we are seeing a resurgence of some of these employee-driven activities,” she said.

Getting buy-in from the boss

The leadership of companies that haven’t experimented with flex time or don’t currently do much to encourage taking summer vacation time may be resistant to change, Cavanaugh notes. However, she adds, building in more flextime in the summer might be a good way to give the concept a trial and see how it fits a company’s culture.

“Summer flexibility is the perfect way to demonstrate that flexibility improves engagement, improves employee morale, and improves performance,” she says. “It can be a test case for the expansion of flexibility after the summer is over.”

Horn said HR departments will see a long-term gain after the initial work of setting up summer flex hours.

“Ultimately, we see this as a welcome addition to strategies that helps recruitment and retention. Summer flexibility can be very meaningful and very well received amongst employees,” she says. “While there may be a little work involved, the return on the offering, in terms of supporting their talent management strategy, would far outweigh the lift of designing a summer work policy.”