All the signs say it’s holiday season: quieter roads, quieter inboxes and it’s a nightmare to get everyone you need to a meeting; yes, holiday season is in full swing! Here are our top five tips to consider in your communications with colleagues:

• Use your comms to encourage good-working practices with all your people: if someone is on holiday, let them be on holiday and avoid that demotivating culture where the expectation is that people will still answer emails or calls from the beach!

• If you manage change comms, summer is not the time to plan a go-live or training. For the headache it will bring to sort out, just wait until September.

• Plan to give your regular email communication updates a break too; if loads of people are on holiday, email comms will get lost in the inbox. Make sure everything your people need to know is on the intranet, so it’s there when they need it. Don’t have an intranet? Why not send out a post-Summer newsletter in September, when most people are back, with everything they might have missed or, better still, organise a Town Hall meeting and tell them face-to-face.

• Encourage all Line Managers to do a ‘welcome back’ meeting with their team to get everyone back into work mode; a quick 20-minute round-up of what’s happened and time to remind people of what you’re all working towards.

• We all love to talk about the exciting adventures - or mishaps! - from our holidays, so bring some of that holiday joy back into the workplace by putting up a noticeboard for employees to pin up their best holiday picture. Or, why not do a Leadership team postcard blog, sharing stories of what the summer holidays has meant to them and their wellbeing.

Happy holidays!

Want to make your comms the best they could ever be? Enthuse Communications specialises in creative communication ideas and delivering them too. Contact us for more details: we’re actually in the office over summer!