How to fix L&D engagement after summer

We opened our recent webinar with a poll. Which learning and development activity has taken the biggest backseat for you lately: courses, coaching, mentoring, or all of it?

Half the room said all of it.

That room was full of HR and people leaders. People who spend their working lives making the case for learning. They've got the evidence memorised already. LinkedIn's Workplace Learning Report found that 84% of employees say learning adds purpose to their work, and that 88% of organisations rank learning opportunities as their top retention strategy. Belief isn't in short supply.

By August, courses, coaching, and mentoring had all quietly slid down the list together anyway.

Here's the number that raises the stakes. Around 79% of UK employees, roughly eight in ten, spend part of their summer looking for another job.

So the quiet month carries a cost. And the thing most businesses reach for to counter it, an annual learning budget with the employee's name on it, turns out to be the part of the strategy doing the least work.

Why does L&D engagement drop over summer?

L&D engagement drops over summer because routines break, decision-makers are away, and development's the first thing to lose its slot in the diary. Around 61% of workers report a productivity dip over the summer months, and 57% of under-35s find it harder to stay motivated in the heat.

Add the school and nursery closures that arrive with a heatwave, and working parents spend a fortnight solving childcare instead of thinking about their careers.

Sit all of that alongside the 79% who spend part of the summer job hunting, and summer starts to look like a decision-making window.

Morale softens. Routines break. Remote teams feel thinner, because the calls get lighter and the incidental conversation disappears. Almost nobody resigns in August. They browse, they compare, and they come back in September more prepared to jump ship.

The slump compounds, too. One senior leader on annual leave becomes a delayed sign-off, which becomes a missed launch date, which becomes the people project that slides into Q4.

It's worth saying clearly, the break itself is valuable. Time away is when people consolidate what they've learned and work out what they want next. The opportunity is to be the workplace everything else gets compared against. When someone comes back in September with a shortlist, they should struggle to find anything on it better than what they've already got.

Why doesn't an L&D budget improve engagement on its own?

A learning budget improves engagement only when it comes with guidance, because most employees can't accurately identify their own development gaps. If you look at the majority of job ads in the UK, you'll find a learning budget on them. A thousand pounds a year, sometimes five. It reads brilliantly, it costs real money, and a surprising amount of it goes unspent every year.

Giving someone a learning budget without guidance hands them a job that's yours to do.

People are busy. That kind of self-awareness arrives through a manager who names something you keep doing, a review that shows a pattern, or a coach who asks the question you've been avoiding. Handing over a budget and waiting skips all of that, then reads the silence as a lack of appetite.

Optional learning tells the same story from another angle. It sees around 20% enrolment and roughly 35% completion.

Those figures point at design. Making learning optional broadcasts exactly how much it matters, and people are very good at reading that signal.

The fix costs less than the budget does:

• Protected hours in the diary. A set number each week, treated like any other commitment.
• A learning goal decided in 1:1s. One line on the agenda template reaches everybody. Our guide to running a better one-to-one covers the structure.
• A manager who asks what someone worked on this month and waits for the answer.
• Explicit permission. State clearly that people are allowed to spend time learning, because under a heavy workload most people assume learning is the first thing they should drop.

How do you improve L&D engagement when nobody has time?

Make the ask smaller. Our second poll asked what's getting in the way of re-engaging teams in learning this autumn. Time won by a distance, with budget a long way behind.

Time is the honest answer, because there really isn't enough of it. A business shows its priorities through what it protects in the diary. Slides and all-hands announcements count for a lot less.

So there's a good argument for going small. A single message to team leads before the autumn restart, with three lines on how to work learning into the feedback they already give, takes an hour to write and reaches everyone. One agenda item added to the one-to-one template does more over six months than a relaunch nobody's got time to attend.

Little and often survives contact with a busy quarter.

Why is September the best month to restart L&D?

September works because of the fresh start effect, the well-documented tendency for people to set and pursue goals at the start of a new period. People are around 47% more likely to set a goal at the start of a new term. The effect catches almost everyone, whether or not they've got children, because we all spent our first eighteen years doing exactly this.

We see it at Heka. Alongside January, September's consistently one of our busiest months for new clients coming on board.

Three things worth doing with that energy while it's there.

That last one was a takeaway for us as much as anyone. We encourage learning heavily inside our own teams and still came away from the session asking how visible any of it really is to everybody else.

One caveat, and it matters all year. September is the easiest month to restart learning, and it should not be the only month you try. A well-built learning plan creates the same energy in February. If yours only works in September, what you have built is a seasonal campaign.

Which employees give you the biggest return on L&D?

Middle managers. Coaching used to be an executive privilege. The businesses seeing the biggest return now spend it a layer or two down, on the managers holding everything together in the middle.

There's a structural reason they need it. Most people arrive in management because they were excellent at the job they were doing, which is a completely different skill from leading the people who now do it. Expecting someone to have tools for something they've never done before sets them up to struggle publicly. We've written before on how to empower employees to succeed and grow, and most of it starts with the manager. Our rundown of the people management skills every leader needs is a good starting point if that's the gap you're looking to fill.

The role's changing shape, too. As AI absorbs more of the task work, what distinguishes a manager is relational:

• Leading through ambiguity, when the strategy's still moving.
• Holding trust while priorities shift underneath the team.
• Staying steady when the answers aren't there yet.

You can learn a feedback framework from a 40 minute module. Using it well with a real person, in a conversation you can't script, in a week where everything's on fire, is where coaching earns its money.

This matters most in businesses growing quickly, where someone who managed three people at a ten-person company becomes a people leader in a two-hundred-person one inside eighteen months. Culture gets created by the behaviours that are expected, accepted, and promoted, and those behaviours get set inside the team rather than on the values page. Middle managers are the ones setting them, often while the ground under their own feet is moving.

The numbers back the spend. Mentored employees are twice as likely to be engaged as those without a mentor, and Gallup finds highly engaged business units see 51% less turnover than bottom-quartile units, in organisations where annual turnover already sits at 40% or below. If retention's the case you're building, our piece on improving employee retention with benefits covers the wider argument.

Why do people actually complete personalised learning?

Because relevance is what carries someone to the end of a course. Personalised learning lifts completion rates by 20% to 35%. Microlearning pushes completion to somewhere between 50% and 70%.

The same pattern runs through benefits generally, where average utilisation across the industry sits at just 13%. What closes that gap is relevance. Whether the thing in front of someone matters to them that week. Across 100,000 bookings tracked on Heka over 36 months, what people choose keeps moving with what's going on in their lives. A static offer stops working for exactly that reason.

A workforce is a lot of different people, doing very different jobs, at very different stages, all at once. A fixed catalogue serves the average of them, and nobody in particular.

So flexibility earns its keep. A learning offer with a broad range of providers behind it, which is how Heka is built, lets people find the thing that's relevant to them this quarter, which is the only version they'll actually complete. The same logic applies across the rest of your provision, which we cover in how to design a flexible benefits programme.

A wider definition of development earns its keep as well. Learning with no obvious line to a job description still produces someone more motivated and performing better. For a new manager, the most useful thing they learn this year might be how to support a team member through a bereavement. It won't appear on any skills matrix, but it'll change how that whole team experiences work.

Your September L&D checklist

• Meet the energy instead of building it. It's arriving anyway.
• Go little and often. A short message beats a relaunch, unless you have genuinely got new L&D benefits to introduce.
• Pair formal courses with coaching, mentoring, and everyday on-the-job learning.
• Make learning visible, and celebrate the wins out loud.
• State clearly that people are allowed to spend time learning.

Let's come back to that 79% of employees job hunting over the summer.

Eight in ten people spent part of the summer wondering whether they'd grow faster somewhere else. The businesses they stay with are the ones where the answer showed up before anyone went looking for it: in a manager conversation, in a coaching session, in a goal that made sense for that specific person. Employees who feel their benefits meet their needs are 3x more likely to stay, and development's one of the places that feeling gets built.

Which is the principle behind everything we build at Heka. The right support, in front of the right person, at the right moment. Coaching and learning sit on Heka in exactly the same way as therapy, fitness, sleep, and nutrition, so development reaches people in the place they already go to look after themselves. You can see what that looks like in practice in our customer case studies.

Missed the session? Watch the full webinar on demand.

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Frequently asked questions

Why don't employees use their learning and development budget?

Because a budget answers the funding question and leaves the harder one open. Most people can't see their own development gaps, and that self-awareness usually arrives through a manager conversation, a performance review, or a coach. Without that guidance, a busy employee defaults to the work in front of them, and the budget quietly expires.

What is a realistic L&D engagement rate?

Optional learning typically sees around 20% enrolment and roughly 35% completion. On our own reading of those two figures together, that's fewer than one in ten employees finishing a course they were simply offered. Personalising that learning lifts those completion rates by a further 20% to 35%, and microlearning formats reach 50% to 70%, so format and relevance move the number more than promotion does.

How do you improve L&D engagement without increasing budget?

Change the design. The spend can stay where it is. Protect a set number of learning hours each week, add a development goal to every one-to-one, brief team leads on working learning into feedback they already give, and make outcomes visible so people see what colleagues are doing. Each of those costs time, and none of them costs money.

Should we invest in coaching or a course library?

Work out what your managers need now and what they'll need in two to three years. If an accessible library of microlearning and quick check-ins covers that capability gap, take it. If your people need something tailored to who they are and where the business is heading, coaching goes further. The deciding factor's the business outcome you need and how quickly you need it.

When is the best time of year to relaunch L&D?

September and January both benefit from the fresh start effect, when people are measurably more likely to set and pursue new goals. September's got the added advantage of a visible year-end finish line. A well-built plan generates similar momentum in any month, so treat September as the easiest month to start rather than the only one.

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