Keeping that holiday feeling

How often do you hear people saying after they’ve only been back to work a week after their holiday, “It doesn’t feel like I’ve been away!”. Just the thought of taking a holiday fills some people with fear. For others it’s the thought of returning which makes them fearful. It doesn’t need to be this way.” - Neil Massa, Smarter Not Harder.

Holiday season is great isn’t it? Two weeks off and plenty of time to unwind, rest and re-charge our depleted batteries. Well, that’s what holidays are supposed to do. But how many times do you hear people say after their first week back, “It doesn’t feel like I’ve been away at all”. The problem is – for most people – holidays leave them with none of this positive feeling. In fact, far from leaving them suitably rested and recuperated, I’ve lost track of the number of people I’ve met who break into a sweat just thinking about the return to work, and find it actually leaves them as tired and as frazzled as they were before they left. With the effort required to catch-up, many wish they’d never been away at all.

Some might say the culprit is simply the build-up of work – projects or actions needed that inevitably pile up. But the real reason 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-off defeats the purpose – but I digress), there’s a basic mathematical reality that most people fail to plan for - that for every week a typical worker is away, they need to set aside six hours of time to catch up with what’s happened (i.e. get back in the flow). For a two-week break, that’s 12 hours of ‘stuff’ that needs catching up on – like getting back up to speed with messages, projects and the activities that took place while they were away. That’s in addition to new things that crop up as soon as people are back.

It may sound obvious, but people are far too ambitious about what they think (or are expected), to achieve in their first week back. Even if they spend three hours’ a day catching up, that’s four days’ worth of mornings that are taken up just getting back to 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 begin to dominate.

The business of catching up

The failure of holidays to leave people properly rested is a business issue, and the solution is one the business must support. It must accept what does need to be inevitable – that there is a fall in productivity during the week following each person’s return from holiday – because each person needs to schedule in this vital catch-up time.

But it’s worth remembering businesses will have benefitted from a huge spike in productivity in the weeks leading up to that person taking their holiday - because they were working extra hard to make sure they got things done. Time for employees to catch up is time well spent. If it enables them to get back to work whilst maintaining some benefit from their break.

Allowing for up to six-hours per week away means that staff won’t fear their return to work. Preparation is the key. Employees shouldn’t be scared of taking a holiday simply because they dread coming back.