There's a quiet assumption baked into a lot of corporate calendars, and that is summer is the slow stretch. Deals are paused, the office empties out, and the team finally gets a chance to breathe before the fall rush. It's a comforting idea, but It's also riddled with falsities.
All that summer does is bring warmer weather, a chance to show off your BBQ skills, and, most importantly for the purpose of this post, reshape your security risks. Think about it, your teams are spread out all over the place, events are packed, and the part everyone forgets, your own office is probably running on a skeleton crew since half the team is out on PTO. You're basically looking at more exposure right when you have less backup. Would you call that a ‘quiet season’? Duty of Care, ‘summer mode’ is just a different kind of busy that needs a different game plan.
Here's how to think about flipping your duty of care program into summer mode.
Let's start with the headline a lot of teams will see and quietly relax over. NOAA's 2026 outlook calls for a below-normal Atlantic hurricane season, specifically, a 55% chance of below-normal activity, with somewhere in the range of eight to fourteen named storms. Good news, right?
Sort of. A seasonal forecast predicts volume, not impact. It tells you roughly how many storms might form across an entire ocean basin. It tells you nothing about whether one of them parks itself over a city where you have a facility, a conference, or forty traveling employees. As NOAA's own forecasters keep reminding everyone, “it only takes one storm to make it a bad year for you specifically”.
The quiet framing above only applies to the Atlantic. The eastern Pacific is expected to be active, and a strengthening El Niño is both suppressing Atlantic storms and driving an unusually hot summer worldwide. Heat domes have already settled over parts of Europe, with record temperatures and heat-related deaths reported early in the season. So, the lesson here is don't confuse a calm average with low exposure.
Let’s talk a bit more about heatwaves.
For a long time, extreme heat was treated as a discomfort to plan around. That framing no longer holds. When destinations your employees actually travel to are hitting temperatures that send locals to the hospital, heat becomes a health and safety obligation.
This is a good moment to ask practical questions. Do your travelers know which destinations are under heat advisories before they book? Do your outdoor or field teams have guidance for working through a heat wave? Does anyone own the decision to pull people from an event or site when conditions cross a line? Summer mode means treating heat with the same seriousness you'd give a storm or a security incident because the duty of care is identical.
US travel spending is projected to push past $1.37 trillion this year, and the strain is already showing up as airport congestion, delays, and cancellations. Layer on aviation capacity pressures tied to fuel costs and global instability, and the result is simple. More of your employees are on the move, and more of them are at risk of getting stranded somewhere when a flight evaporates or a route closes.
Stranded employees become a duty of care problem the moment a disruption hits. Speed of response matters, along with knowing who is where. Knowing that you have three people connecting through a hub the day a storm rolls in, or two executives in a city where unrest is building, is the entire game. That awareness has to exist before the disruption, because it cannot be assembled in a panic after.
Summer is peak season for mass gatherings, and 2026 is an outlier even by summer standards. The FIFA World Cup is unfolding across the US, Canada, and Mexico, drawing enormous crowds, global attention, and a lot of heightened emotion to dozens of host cities. Add the usual festival, convention, and holiday calendar on top of that.
Crowds are also where grievance finds an audience. Civil unrest tied to elections is expected to intensify through the back half of 2026 in a number of countries, and large public events have a way of becoming flashpoints. If your people, your brand, or your executives intersect with any of these crowds, your threat monitoring needs to be tuned to the specific cities, dates, and venues in play, and most definitely not running on its January settings.
Now the uncomfortable part. The same summer that stretches your exposure across more places, more heat, and more crowds is the summer your analysts, operators, and decision-makers are taking their own well-earned time off. Coverage thins out right when the workload climbs.
This is the single most fixable item on the list, and the most overlooked. Summer mode means pressure-testing your escalation paths for a skeleton crew. If your most experienced operator is on a beach with no signal, does the alert still reach someone who can act? Are your playbooks written so a stand-in can execute them without a three-paragraph backstory? A program that only holds up when the A-team is fully staffed will let you down in the exact week it matters most.
Summer mode is a deliberate re-tune of your operation for the next ninety days. Here is what that looks like in practice:
Proactive preparation is essential for a successful summer. A deceptive forecast can lead a program to become complacent, which often results in teams struggling to react when a single heat wave, storm, or stranded executive escalates into a full-blown crisis.
That's the whole point of duty of care: doing the quiet work now so nobody has to do the loud work later.