What happens psychologically when we return to work?

This transition can feel psychologically uncomfortable. Self-Determination Theory is a useful framework for helping us understand this environmental shift and how it makes us feel. It proposes that people have three fundamental psychological needs:

• Autonomy: a sense of choice and control.

• Competence: a sense that we can deal effectively with what is required of us.

• Relatedness: a sense of connection with other people.

Satisfaction of these needs is associated with motivation, wellbeing and high-quality performance (Deci, Olafsen & Ryan, 2017).

This gives us an interesting way of looking at holidays. A holiday can provide unusually high levels of autonomy. You decide when to wake up, where to go and what to do, and you have probably spent considerably more time with people you care deeply about. The demands on you are also likely to be less complex than at work.

Returning to work can suddenly reduce that sense of choice. The diary dictates when you start, and the organisation or other people often determine, or at least influence, your priorities. The contrast between the simple cognitive tasks required on holiday compared to work demands can undermine a sense of competence, and no longer being surrounded by loved ones can often impinge on a sense of connection.

This does not mean that work is bad, but the contrast can be substantial. The same person who felt relaxed and in control during a week off may feel constrained and overloaded by Monday morning.

Who finds returning to work after a holiday hardest?

Some roles and occupations feel this transition more acutely than others.

The people most likely to struggle are those who manage a high workload. If someone returns to hundreds of emails, several urgent projects and a backlog of decisions, the psychological contrast can be substantial. The holiday has not necessarily caused the problem, it has simply temporarily removed the person from it.

Research involving more than 38,000 employees found that the higher the workload, the harder people found it to psychologically detach, while detachment was associated with better wellbeing and lower exhaustion (Wendsche & Lohmann-Haislah, 2017). This creates something of a paradox: those who may need recovery most can find it hardest to achieve.

Those with emotionally demanding roles, such as healthcare, education, hospitality and customer-facing positions, are likely to be more acutely affected. These roles require people to regulate their own emotions while responding to the needs of others. Research on recovery suggests that emotional demands and social stressors can make detachment more difficult (Wendsche & Lohmann-Haislah, 2017).

Returning for people in such roles therefore isn’t simply about becoming productive again. It can also mean immediately becoming emotionally available to other people.

Another group particularly affected are those in roles where absence creates a backlog. If taking annual leave does not reduce the amount of work that exists, it simply means the work waits. The person therefore returns to normal work plus accumulated work. This can be particularly draining and is likely to interfere with the ability to truly detach when taking leave.

For working parents of school-aged children, the end of summer can be even more psychologically demanding because they may be undergoing two transitions simultaneously. They are returning to work whilst their children are returning to school and the two systems have to work together.

A parent can be delighted that school is starting again while simultaneously feeling guilty for being delighted. Both feelings can be true.

It is also important not to assume that the summer holiday necessarily represents recovery for parents. For some families, summer simply replaces work pressure with family and logistical pressure.

The leadership tax

So high workload, emotional demands, backlogs and parenting pressures make detachment particularly difficult. Interestingly, those in mid to senior level leadership roles are highly likely to be experiencing all of these concurrently.

Switching off in a leadership role is particularly hard, making leaders more susceptible to the psychological difficulties of the work-holiday-work transition.

There is an important tension here. The more responsibility someone carries, the harder it can be to detach. Yet the greater that responsibility, the more important recovery may be to their judgement, behaviour and ability to perform.

Leaders must take their own psychological needs seriously, and not mistake resilience for endurance. At some stage as a leader, you must find time for a ‘phones off, laptop closed’ holiday for a period that allows you to truly detach. If not, the impact on performance and wellbeing in the long term is likely to be detrimental to you.

But leaders also have a role to play in the environment their people return to. If the first day back means an overflowing inbox, an immediate backlog of decisions and an expectation to return instantly to maximum performance, much of the benefit of recovery can quickly disappear.

How can you make returning to work after a holiday easier?

After a period of leave, it is overly optimistic to expect everyone to be “back to normal” on Monday. Perhaps the biggest mistake organisations can make is assuming that returning to work means immediately returning to maximum performance.

As people needed to transition to being on holiday, they will need to transition back.

So what can people – and the leaders around them – do to ease this transition?

Expect a transition period. Don’t interpret the first few days as evidence that you hate your job. Feeling flat, distracted or slightly overwhelmed doesn’t necessarily mean anything profound. You are changing psychological gears. Give yourself some time. Leaders should be wary of interpreting that adjustment period as a lack of motivation or commitment.

Don’t try to catch up with everything immediately. That can produce an enormous cognitive load. Not everything that accumulated while you were away became urgent simply because you returned. Re-establishing priorities can be more useful than simply confronting the backlog.

Re-establish sleep. If your holiday involved later nights and later mornings, returning immediately to an early alarm can be unpleasant. A gradual adjustment before returning to work or school can make the transition easier.

Keep something from the holiday. If everything that made summer enjoyable disappears on the first Monday back, the psychological contrast becomes even greater. Keep something. It might be a walk after work, planned family time, reading, or a better exercise regime. Find a way to prevent life from suddenly feeling like nothing but work.

Protect psychological detachment. Don’t spend the final days of summer mentally rehearsing everything that might go wrong at work. Research suggests that psychological detachment is an important recovery experience and that work-related activity and demands during non-work time can interfere with it (Wendsche & Lohmann-Haislah, 2017; Karabinski et al., 2021).

A useful distinction is that planning is useful, rumination isn’t. Write down what needs doing, then stop thinking about it.

And for leaders, perhaps there is a bigger lesson. Performance isn’t a switch people can simply turn back on when they walk through the door. It is influenced by workload, autonomy, connection, recovery and the environment people return to.

Sustainable high performance requires periods of effort and recovery. Good leaders understand both. So perhaps the challenge after the summer break isn’t simply to get everyone back up to speed as quickly as possible. It is to create the conditions in which people can perform at their best again.

About Matt Johns

Matt Johns MBE is Managing Director of Fieri. With a background spanning leadership, psychology and the military, he works with organisations to build leadership capability and create the conditions for sustained performance.

References

de Bloom, J., Geurts, S. A. E., Taris, T. W., Sonnentag, S., de Weerth, C. & Kompier, M. A. J. (2010). Effects of vacation from work on health and well-being: Lots of fun, quickly gone. Work & Stress, 24(2), 196–216.

Deci, E. L., Olafsen, A. H. & Ryan, R. M. (2017). Self-Determination Theory in Work Organizations: The State of a Science. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 4, 19–43.

Karabinski, T., Haun, V. C., Nübold, A., Wendsche, J. & Wegge, J. (2021). Interventions for Improving Psychological Detachment From Work: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 26(3), 224–242.

Sonnentag, S. & Fritz, C. (2007). The Recovery Experience Questionnaire: Development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 12(3), 204–221.

Sonnentag, S. & Fritz, C. (2015). Recovery from job stress: The stressor-detachment model as an integrative framework. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 36(S1), S72–S103.

Wendsche, J. & Lohmann-Haislah, A. (2017). A Meta-Analysis on Antecedents and Outcomes of Detachment from Work. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 2072.