The only thing worse than holidays coming to an end is dealing with the pile up of work emails that faces you on your first day back on the job.
All the relaxing and switching off you did on your break can be swiftly undone by an onslaught of requests, tasks, check-ins and more, so how do you deal with them without winding up booking another holiday for the nerves?
Caroline Reidy of HR Suite joined Drivetime to share her tips for ticking off backed up work emails once you get back to your desk.
Work days have become filled with conversations that flit back and forth over Slack, Teams, WhatsApp and more – particularly since remote and hybrid working has become the norm – but somehow emails are the ones that strike panic in the hearts of workers most.
Reidy said that "the issue is we're trying to actually do work in the middle but because of the amount of interruptions all the research tells us that it's hugely impacting productivity and now we're trying to get people to singularly task rather than jump around".
She added that for those of us who do a job or a task that we do't particularly enjoy, "we're delighted to see the email pop up to distract us for any excuse to do something else".
On whether emails should be switched off during work hours to allow us to focus on the tasks at hand, Reidy said there are two challenges that come up with this.
"One is I think during the working day there needs to be certain times when we're doing tasks that [are] tedious or really requires concentration. It's definitely better to turn off notifications then because all the research tells us you're going to be a lot more productive during that time."
She continued that checking in on emails here and there gives people, herself included, "comfort" that they're not waiting for an onslaught on unanswered emails. "For others, we've got the right to disconnect and it's important that we respect that."
Another solution is to auto-delete incoming emails when we're on holiday, leaving it up to the sender to reach out again if their request is urgent. Reidy, however, said that would give her "an absolute coronary".
"I definitely do put my out of office on when I'm on holidays and redirect emails to my colleagues and I'm lucky enough that I can do that, but I definitely think you would hate something to fall between the cracks, and we're very responsive to customer needs that we'd never contemplate that."
She added that she can see how doing so would give people "great joy because I'm sure the holiday fear going back after two weeks being off is very really for everybody".
Listen back to the full interview above.
