The Rules of Summer 2025

When will your clients, customers, and colleagues be around this summer? No one seems to know.

Every summer brings new norms for summer Fridays, weekday hours, and vacationing. But less than a month into the season, experts say differences in expectations among organizations are increasing rapidly. Some facing tariff issues are tightening the reins on workers; others are letting their foot off the pedal as they gear up for a tough autumn. Either way, “it’s really been all over the place,” says Louis Montgomery, principal at the HR Center of Expertise at Korn Ferry.

Typically, organizations are consistent within themselves: Employees know what days to swing by the office, and whether it’s OK to, say, log into a meeting from Mom’s kitchen on July 3, and whether most of that day needs to be categorized as PTO. This internal consistency, say HR experts, brings both continuity and availability: People know when and where to find their colleagues. But the variation from firm to firm has presented unusual upheaval for people who work with clients or customers at many other firms, or people who live with employees of other companies.

At some firms, most workers can be found in the office. At Chicago law firms last week, occupancy averaged 71%, according to data from Kastle Systems; similarly high numbers can be found in fields like finance and consumer retail, where RTO efforts have been largely successful. Yet in-office rates vary enormously in other fields: U.S. office occupancy dipped down as low as 30% in some cities last week. Across the board, experts are predicting an unusually busy summer. But when that work gets done varies widely.

This leaves employees to decipher the norms of their clients and customers themselves. For example, when scheduling meetings across time zones, in-office employees are typically quite uncompromising about early or late meetings. “Hybrid and remote people are much more flexible with time, especially after 5pm,” says Paul Fogel, sector leader for professional search in the Software practice at Korn Ferry. This sort of flexibility is very attractive to workers, according to research by Korn Ferry.

In some fields, Thursdays and Fridays are quiet, and colleagues are hard-pressed to get clients to pick up the phone on a Friday, let alone schedule a meeting. This leads to very busy Mondays. “It’s almost like there’s an axe murderer at my office door on Monday at 5am,” says David Vied, global sector leader for medical devices and diagnostics at Korn Ferry, “People are racing for things that could’ve been resolved on Thursday and Friday.

Quiet Fridays do not necessarily mean that people are not engaging in work activities. Executive development experts report that clients commonly schedule end-of-week development sessions. “I have four coaching sessions this Friday,” says Anya Weaver, principal consultant at Korn Ferry. “My Fridays can be my busiest days.”

Norms do seem to be congealing across industries around one aspect of vacations. On more extravagant vacations, whether trips to the beach or abroad, employees are either entirely logged off, or if they need to check in, presetting limited availability hours. As for visits over to a cousin’s or parent’s house, full-time work for a few days with relatives in the background is an accepted norm. “I do see more people logging in from family houses,” says Chloe Carr, communications specialist at Korn Ferry. “ Sometimes an eight-hour workday is a breath of fresh air when visiting relatives.”

Learn more about Korn Ferry’s Organization Strategy capabilities.

Read more This Week in Leadership articles