Less Meetings, More Morale: Leadership Advice for Summer (and Beyond)

Summer is supposed to be the season when things slow down a little. Longer days, lighter calendars, well-earned vacations. But for many employees, the experience is the opposite: the same meeting cadence, the same deadlines, the same expectations—delivered on top of school schedules, family commitments and the cumulative exhaustion of a year that never quite paused. The result is predictable. According to Eagle Hill Consulting’s 2025 Workforce Burnout Survey, 55% of the U.S. workforce is currently experiencing burnout, while Gallup data puts global disengagement at levels that cost the world economy an estimated $8.8 trillion in lost productivity annually. Summer does not cause this. But it exposes it.

Members of the Senior Executive HR Think Tank, a curated group of human resources leaders, executives and organizational strategists, were asked a simple question: What is the one thing leaders should stop doing during the summer if they want to improve employee morale and productivity? Their answers cut across micromanagement, capacity overload, meeting culture, performance surveillance and the leadership habit of waiting for the right moment to fix what is already not working.

Taken together, their recommendations reveal something important: Summer is not a special case that requires a seasonal workaround. It is an opportunity to practice the kind of leadership that should be standard year-round—and to stop the habits that erode trust, morale and performance regardless of the month.

“I’ve found it beneficial for myself and other leaders to zoom out and look at larger sample sizes of the work employees do instead of evaluating on an hourly or daily basis.”

– Rob Tillman, Founder and Global Positioning Strategist of UNIGNORABLE

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Zoom Out: Let Employees Recover on Their Own Terms

The instinct to flag a productivity dip the moment it appears is understandable. Managers are accountable for output, and summer brings genuine disruptions—school schedules, vacations, shifting energy levels. But Rob Tillman, Founder and Global Positioning Strategist of UNIGNORABLE—a full-service consultancy with a proprietary approach for positioning job-seekers to be seen and selected for top career opportunities—and an award-winning business coach and international keynote speaker who has navigated more than $1 billion in business sales growth, makes the case for a counterintuitive response: wait.

“When it comes to productivity leading to morale building or destruction, I’ve found it beneficial for myself and other leaders to zoom out and look at larger sample sizes of the work employees do instead of evaluating on an hourly or daily basis,” Tillman says. “This is specifically valuable in the summer months, where employees often experience unavoidable disruptions to their normal patterns beyond other times of the year.”

The behavioral dynamic he describes is precise: most employees already know when a disruption has affected their output and are quietly planning to make up for it. When a manager intervenes immediately, that self-correction gets preempted—and with it, a genuine opportunity to recognize initiative disappears.

“If a manager immediately focuses on this occurrence without allowing the employee time to take action on their own to make up for the lapse, it prevents the opportunity of being pleasantly surprised,” Tillman adds. “If the employee actively made up for the shortfall, a reason to deliver accolades for building morale is missed. By instantly pointing out the lapse, it questions the employee’s planned action and it creates the belief that any improvement was driven by the manager’s actions—not the employee’s internal desire.”

“Stop wanting to be right at all costs. Stop judging before understanding.”

– Thomas Gelmi, Executive Coach and Mentor, Author and Speaker at Movadis AG

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Lead With Trust, Not Two Cents

Thomas Gelmi, Executive Coach and Mentor, Author and Speaker at Movadis AG—the Zurich-based firm behind the GELMI brand, which delivers measurably more impact in leadership, teamwork and customer relations for clients including Roche, Siemens, Ford, the International Olympic Committee and the World Trade Organization—has coached more than 10,000 leaders across 25 years and four languages. His answer to the summer leadership question begins with a concession and ends with a challenge.

“Stop micromanaging those who can find their own solutions to problems and know how to do the job,” Gelmi says. “Stop adding your two cents to everything, even if it doesn’t add value. Stop wanting to be right at all costs. Stop judging before understanding.”

His list continues with a clarity that is uncomfortable precisely because it is so recognizable: Stop criticizing people in front of others; stop blaming and finger-pointing; stop focusing only on problems without giving praise and reinforcing good performance; stop creating a climate of fear and tension to boost performance.

“This is valid for all seasons,” Gelmi adds pointedly. The summer framing matters not because these behaviors are seasonal—they are not—but because longer days and lighter staffing create more visible contrast between leaders who trust their teams and those who do not. Summer is when the leadership climate that has been building all year either supports people or exposes how little it has.

Give Flexibility the Benefit of the Doubt

One of the most corrosive assumptions a leader can carry into summer is the suspicion that an employee choosing flexibility over face time is choosing something other than work. Dr. Curtis Odom, Managing Partner of Prescient Strategists—a consultancy that helps organizations build the human capabilities required for AI investments to generate lasting value, with proprietary frameworks in active use across healthcare, financial services and professional services—and Executive Professor of Management and Organizational Development at Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business, names this assumption directly.

“One thing leaders should stop doing during the summer is assuming employees are less committed because they prioritize vacation time, family activities, or flexible schedules,” Dr. Odom says. “Summer often brings a natural shift in personal obligations and energy patterns. Effective leaders recognize that recovery and performance are closely connected.”

His prescription is outcome-focused and relational: rather than increasing oversight or questioning engagement, redirect attention to clear priorities and workload management. The evidence for this approach is well-established—employees who feel trusted to balance their responsibilities tend to return that trust with precisely the kind of sustained performance leaders are trying to protect.

“Employees who feel trusted to balance their responsibilities are more likely to remain motivated, productive and committed,” Dr. Odom adds. “A culture that respects time away from work often returns stronger focus, higher morale and better results.”

“Summer is a great reminder that people aren’t machines. Though we are often busier, it also gives us a chance to reset our nervous systems. This often leads to clarity.”

– Kelly Murphy, Founder and Strategic HR Advisor at Lean in HR

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Trade Productivity Obsession for Genuine Connection

There is a paradox at the center of summer leadership that Kelly Murphy, Founder and Strategic HR Advisor at Lean in HR—an HR consulting firm dedicated to empowering small businesses with effective, practical HR solutions, specializing in compliance, culture strategy and executive partnership for organizations with fewer than 50 employees—describes with disarming simplicity.

“The leaders who move the needle are the ones who invest in connection,” Murphy says. “Authenticity builds trust, trust drives engagement and engaged people produce better results. The irony is that when leaders stop obsessing over productivity and focus on building relationships, productivity often follows.”

Her framing of summer as a nervous system reset is not metaphorical—it is behavioral. People who are genuinely depleted do not produce their best work, and summer, for all its logistical complexity, offers a recurring opportunity to return to what actually sustains performance over time.

“Summer is a great reminder that people aren’t machines,” Murphy adds. “Though we are often busier, it also gives us a chance to reset our nervous systems. This often leads to clarity.” That clarity—the kind that comes from genuine connection rather than constant output monitoring—is what carries teams through the harder seasons that follow.

Manage Capacity Like It’s Part of the Strategy

The instinct to ask the remaining team to carry the load of absent colleagues is both understandable and predictably destructive. Sharifah Masten, Managing Partner and Principal Advisor of Counterpoint Collective—a strategic advisory firm that helps organizations align people, leadership, technology and communications to drive sustainable growth, founded by a former Chief Human Resources Officer and U.S. Army Non-Commissioned Officer—identifies this as one of the most consequential summer leadership failures, and frames it as a symptom of something that runs all year.

“Leaders should stop treating summer as business as usual and expecting employees to absorb every vacation and staffing gap by simply working harder,” Masten says. “Too often, organizations treat reduced capacity as a burden the remaining team should carry. The results are predictable: higher stress, resentment and declining performance masked as responsiveness.”

Her prescription is structural: reset workloads, clarify what is truly mission-critical and make deliberate choices about what can wait. This is not a seasonal adjustment—it is how strategic leadership is supposed to work. “A better approach is to reset workloads and clarify what is truly mission-critical,” she explains. “That means deciding what can wait and redistributing responsibilities when capacity is constrained. Strategic leadership isn’t about maintaining constant output, but making disciplined choices about where effort creates the most value.”

“Summer simply exposes a year-round problem,” Masten adds. “Organizations continuously add work without removing any. Morale improves when employees see that capacity is being managed, not assumed. Sustainable performance comes by designing work with the same intention applied to business results.”

Measure Results, Not Hours Online

The performance expectation gap—the distance between what summer actually looks like for employees and what organizations continue to demand of them—is one of the most straightforward sources of summer disengagement. Tyler Crebar, Founder and CEO of Crebar Career Consulting—a career strategy and recruiting firm built on firsthand recruiting experience at JPMorgan Chase, LinkedIn and the NCAA—puts the problem and the solution in plain terms.

“Leaders shouldn’t be expecting the same productivity levels during the summer,” Crebar says. “Summer often brings vacations, family commitments and shifting schedules, yet many organizations continue to operate with the same meeting cadence, deadlines and expectations. Instead of measuring productivity by hours online or time in meetings, leaders should focus on outcomes and results.”

The switch from input measurement to outcome measurement is not just a summer accommodation—it is a more accurate way to assess performance at any time of year. Measuring hours online conflates presence with productivity; measuring results actually captures the value being created.

“Giving employees more flexibility and autonomy during the summer can reduce burnout, improve morale and often lead to higher-quality work,” Crebar adds. “When employees feel trusted to manage their responsibilities, engagement and performance tend to follow.”

Fix What’s Broken Now—Don’t Wait for the Right Season

Christopher Bylone’s response challenges the premise of the question itself. Bylone, Principal Strategist and Founder of Innovation Unbiased—a strategic consultancy that transforms workplace culture through data-driven, people-centered strategies and host of the podcast “I Know I Belong When…”—rejects the framing that summer is uniquely important for morale with a directness the rest of the calendar year deserves.

“The question assumes summer is the moment to fix morale. The season is not the lever,” Bylone says. “The one thing leaders should stop doing is waiting for a season to change what is not working. We do this with every calendar marker—the new quarter, January, the summer reset. Leaders hold a known problem hostage to a start date, as if morale erodes on a schedule and recovers on one. It does not.”

His counter-move is to flip the framing from stopping to starting—specifically, intentional listening that produces visible outcomes. The distinction he draws between survey and signal is one of the sharpest in the conversation.

“The one thing to start with is listening with intention,” Bylone adds. “Not listening to reply. Not collecting feedback you have no plan to use. Listening that moves a decision people can see. That is the difference between a survey and a signal. People know they belong when their input visibly changes something—and that knowing is what carries both morale and productivity through any season.”

Delete the ‘Only Reach Out If Urgent’ Line From Your Out-of-Office

Sometimes the most powerful leadership signal is the smallest one. Volen Vulkov, Co-Founder of Enhancv—a career platform that helps professionals tell their story with clarity and confidence, whose work has been cited by the Thunderbird School of Management, the University of Miami and Udemy—identifies a single phrase that encodes an entire leadership failure: “only reach out if it’s urgent.”

“Stop adding ‘only reach out if it’s urgent’ to your vacation responders,” Vulkov says. “That phrase is an emotional anchor that forces your team to constantly play gatekeeper and guess your anxiety levels.”

The behavioral dynamic this creates is subtle but corrosive. When a leader qualifies their absence with urgency thresholds, they are not setting a boundary—they are setting a surveillance trap. Team members spend their time evaluating whether a given situation meets the bar rather than making decisions, developing judgment and experiencing the genuine psychological safety of operating without a net.

“True summer morale blooms when a leader completely vanishes,” Vulkov adds. “Disappearing entirely signals a profound trust that your team can run the ship, giving them the ultimate psychological space to breathe.” The distinction between qualified and unqualified absence is the difference between a leader who trusts and one who monitors even while formally away.

Let Async Communication Replace Back-to-Back Meetings

The meeting-heavy summer calendar is one of the most broadly recognized sources of summer resentment—and one of the easiest to fix. Dr. Jonathan H. Westover, Associate Dean and Director of HR Programs at Western Governors University, Founder and CEO of Human Capital Innovations—a global leadership consulting and coaching firm dedicated to helping organizations maximize human potential—and Chief Workforce and Learning Officer at Future State University, makes the case with characteristic directness.

“Leaders should stop scheduling back-to-back meetings during summer months,” Dr. Westover says. “When the weather is beautiful and days are longer, employees feel trapped by endless video calls and conference rooms. This creates resentment and kills productivity.”

His alternative is structural: Embrace asynchronous communication, let people update via Slack or email when it suits their schedule and trust the team to manage deliverables without constant check-ins. The productivity benefits he describes are not speculative—they are a direct consequence of reducing context-switching, which research consistently identifies as one of the primary productivity drains in modern knowledge work.

“The benefits are immediate: Employees can take walks during lunch, leave early on Fridays, or work from a park,” Dr. Westover adds. “They return energized rather than drained. Many will actually be more productive because they’re not context-switching between meetings all day. By reducing meeting culture during these months, you signal that you value work-life balance and respect people’s time. Your team will remember this flexibility when November rolls around and everyone’s grinding again.”

Model Real Disconnection During Time Off

Britton Bloch, VP of Global Talent Acquisition Strategy and Head of Recruiting at Navy Federal Credit Union, identifies a leadership behavior that is both extremely common and deeply revealing about the organizational culture it operates within.

“One thing leaders should stop doing is responding to emails while on vacation after clearly communicating they are out of office,” Bloch says. “When leaders continue checking in, answering emails and making decisions during PTO, it sends an unintended message that disconnecting is not truly acceptable. Employees notice these behaviors and often feel pressure to remain available themselves, even when taking time off.”

Her framing turns the vacation email check into a delegation question. If a leader cannot be absent without monitoring work, the barrier is not the volume of emails—it is the absence of the organizational infrastructure that makes true absence possible.

“Strong teams should be empowered to operate without constant leader intervention,” Bloch adds. “If a leader cannot step away without monitoring work, the issue may not be workload—it may be a deeper challenge related to delegation, role clarity, succession planning or team readiness. Healthy organizations build systems and talent pipelines that allow leaders to disconnect, employees to grow and work to continue effectively. Sometimes the best leadership signal is not being present, but demonstrating confidence that the team can succeed without you.“

Leadership Habits Worth Leaving Behind—Starting Now

The following insights, one drawn from each Think Tank member, offer a practical framework for any leader ready to approach the summer months differently.

• Zoom out before you intervene. Allow employees to make up for a productivity dip on their own terms—then recognize them when they do, rather than preempting the self-correction and claiming the credit. 
• Stop the behaviors that undermine your team regardless of the season. Micromanagement, blame, criticism in public and performance-by-fear are not summer problems—they are leadership problems that summer simply makes harder to ignore. 
• Drop the assumption that flexibility signals a lack of commitment. Employees who feel trusted to balance their personal and professional lives during summer are more likely to stay motivated, engaged and productive—not less. 
• Invest in connection before you optimize for output. Authenticity builds trust, trust drives engagement and engagement produces the results—stop monitoring productivity and start building the relationships that sustain it. 
• Treat workload management as a leadership responsibility, not a team burden. When capacity is reduced, leaders must decide what can wait—not assume the remaining team can absorb the gap by simply working harder. 
• Shift from input measurement to outcome measurement. Hours online and meeting attendance are not proxies for value created—focus on results and give employees the flexibility and autonomy to achieve them their own way. 
• When something isn’t working, fix it now. Do not hold a known leadership problem hostage to a seasonal start date—act on what you hear, and make sure employees can see that their input has visibly changed something. 
• Cut meeting density and embrace asynchronous work. Reducing back-to-back meetings during summer gives employees time to breathe, reduces context-switching and signals that the organization values how people work, not just when they are online. 
• Remove the urgency qualifier from your vacation auto-reply. “Only reach out if it’s urgent” is an emotional anchor that keeps your team in gatekeeper mode—disappear cleanly and give them the psychological space to operate with genuine ownership. 
• Actually disconnect when you say you are out of office. When leaders check email during PTO, they signal that real disconnection is not acceptable—and every team member watching adjusts their own behavior accordingly. 

Summer Doesn’t Create These Problems. It Reveals Them.

Every leadership failure described in this article—micromanagement, workload overload, meeting saturation, surveillance during vacation—has been present all year. Summer does not invent them. It illuminates them, because the contrast between what employees need and what organizations continue to demand becomes harder to ignore when the days are longer and the capacity is thinner. The good news is that the same is true of great leadership behaviors: trust, flexibility, outcome orientation and genuine delegation are visible all year, and their effects compound in every direction.

The leaders who use this summer to stop one of the habits identified here will not just improve morale for a few months. They will discover that the behaviors worth stopping are the ones that have been costing them engagement, performance and retention all along—and that the season’s most valuable gift is the motivation to finally let them go.