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How did you feel while opening your email inbox or company messaging platform after the long fourth of July weekend?
Perhaps you were itching to get back into your work, reinvigorated after an extended weekend with extra time for relaxing, seeing family and friends, and enjoying the celebrations.
But not everyone is lucky enough to feel so refreshed. For many, returning to work after the long weekend, possibly with a sore head brought on by one beer or cocktail too many, will have felt like a real slog.
And as vacation season gets under full swing, it’s time for us to revisit what we expect from employees upon their return from time off.
42% of Americans dread coming back to work after time off
Even if you love your current job, at some point in your career you’ll have returned from a vacation – the kind that makes you question why we spend our lives hunched over desks rather than lazing on the beach or reporting metrics to superiors rather than forging life-long memories with our loved ones – dreading your first day back at work.
In your absence, your workload tripled, five new weekly meetings were added to your calendar, and your colleague who was meant to cover your workload decided they didn’t have the time or just couldn’t be bothered.
To make matters worse, every person you spoke to on your first day back told you how the break would have done you good, and that you surely must feel so well-rested and ready to get back into the flow of work.
It’s time we stopped this misconception. 42% of Americans dread returning to work after time off, and only 13% feel excited about their return.
Like it or not, for many employees – and particularly for Gen Z and millennial workers who make up an increasingly large share of the workforce – coming back from vacation does not bring about feelings of excitement and high energy, but of exhaustion, burnout, and disengagement.
As one user on X wrote in a viral post:
“I have never come back from any holiday feeling relaxed, refreshed & reinvigorated to get back into work. I come back with the taste of freedom, still fresh in my mouth, a renewed hatred for work, and a strong suspicion that this is not what I should be spending my life doing.”
A bit strong, perhaps, and not every worker will feel a “hatred” for the work they do. But hyperbole aside, HR teams and people managers should recognize that many employees will not always return from time off feeling light, breezy, or charged up.
Create a healthy vacation culture
41% of US employees and 47% of managers report experiencing post-time off burnout, which may present in low energy levels, a loss of motivation, fatigue, exhaustion, irritability, anxiety, and so on.
It’s not to say that employers shouldn’t be encouraging vacations to combat burnout, increase happiness, and improve mental wellbeing. Creating a culture where employees see the importance of taking time off and feel safe or encouraged to do so is vital to a healthy working environment.
However, let’s stop expecting it to be a given that after coming back from vacation, productivity and engagement will spike, and that all the issues affecting an employee’s motivation will magically disappear.
We should certainly remember that a vacation can often come at the cost of an overflowing email inbox or an insurmountable to-do list that can overwhelm employees and even leave them questioning their work entirely.
One former colleague once confessed to me they tackle this issue by bulk-deleting every single email they received while on vacation, arguing ‘If it’s important, they’ll email back.’ For obvious reasons, I don’t recommend that specific approach, but it shows the drastic measures workers may resort to when coming back to work with a total slump in engagement.
Particularly for those workers whose ‘purpose’ in life does not come from their current job or work, a return from vacation is arguably the point at which their motivation will be lowest.
So yes, let’s encourage our workers to take vacations and make the most of their time off. But let’s not pressure them to come back reinvigorated or expect them to always be highly motivated on their return.
