Holiday season: great, isn’t it? Two weeks off and plenty of time to unwind, rest and recharge your depleted batteries. Well, that’s what it’s supposed to be about, anyway. But how many times do you hear colleagues say during their first week back, “It doesn’t even feel like I’ve been away at all”? For a worrying majority of workers, holidays are the proverbial footprints on the beach that are all too swiftly washed away by the tide. Far from leaving staff suitably rested and recuperated, I’ve lost track of how many people I’ve spoken to who break into a sweat just thinking about the First Day Back, and find their return actually leaves them as tired and as frazzled as they were before they left. Indeed, with all the effort required to catch up on work that they parked before their breaks, or has built up in the interval, many workers wish they’d never been away at all.
Some may say the culprit is simply that build-up of work: urgent projects or actions that inevitably stack up while your desk is deserted. But we would say there is nothing inevitable about it at all: the real reason why people fail to maintain their holiday state is lack of preparation. The truth is, even if staff look at emails while they’re away (which kind of defeats the purpose – but I digress), there’s a basic mathematical reality that most people fail to factor in: that for every week a typical worker is on holiday, they need to set aside six hours of time to catch up with what’s happened – or, in other words, to get back in the flow. For a two-week break, that equals 12 hours of ‘stuff’ that needs catching up on – stuff they may not even be aware of, in addition to new things that crop up as soon as they return. It may sound obvious, but people are far too ambitious about what they think they can (or are expected to) achieve in their first week back. Even if they spend three hours per day catching up, that’s four days’ worth of mornings that are taken up purely with getting back to a state of normality. It’s when people forget about this, and start piling themselves up with new work, that feelings of being unable to cope rise to the fore.
The failure of holidays to leave employees properly rested is a business issue – so the solution is one the business must support. It must accept an element of inevitability – namely, that there is a fall in productivity during the week of any given worker’s return from a break – because it is important for each staffer to schedule in that vital catch-up time. Ideally, the catch-up time should be driven by face-to-face meetings – wherein the returned worker can discuss with colleagues in person the full details of what’s happened, who’s covered what and what still needs to be done. It’s a far more effective method than trying to wade through epic email threads, spilling over with replies from multiple different participants, which tend to be the first things that confront workers once they get back to their desks. It may seem to business leaders that this catch-up time is a hindrance. But allow it, they must. It’s worth remembering that a business will benefit from the huge spike in productivity that occurs in the weeks leading up to an employee’s departure for holiday, because that person was working extra hard to make sure they got things done. Surely, time to recover from that is time well spent, if it enables staff to get back to work in a sharper state, rather than feel they were never away? Providing the crucial buffer of this six-hours-per-week-away time means that staff won’t fear their return to work. It may well be that they won’t need to use all of it – in which case, you will have earned back some of that time unexpectedly. But preparation is the key. Employees shouldn’t be scared of taking a holiday simply because they’re afraid that they’ll dread coming back.
Neil Massa is a specialist in employee productivity and specifically time management in the digital age. He is co-founder of Smarter Not Harder, a consulting, training and coaching services provider.