For many employees, the concept of returning to the office after a long holiday isn’t usually a good experience. Besides re-adapting back to your work schedule after relaxing and enjoying festive treats, there is the likelihood that your employees are returning to many unread messages. Add this to the post-Christmas, midwinter blues and it may be part of the reasons your employees aren’t returning to a good experience. With this in mind, we’d like to provide 3 tips for employees and employers on how we can make returning to work a good experience.
Plan Out Your Day, Calculate How to Readjust
On your first day back before your workday begins, you could plan out how you’re going to start your first day. For most the best way to do that is by creating a to-do list that contains your itineraries that you will do in the office. Firstly, and most begrudgingly, start with those as of yet uncompleted tasks that were set before leaving for the holidays. Tackling these can not only help as it reminds you where you left off, but also provide that great sense of completion and achievement early in returning to work, thereby giving you a good starting point and sense of achievement. Moreover, it may help you get back into your typical work routine. Although there may be a temptation to start something new as soon as you return, we recommend that you don’t. This may lead to you feeling tired and overwhelmed before lunch. Aim to do lighter tasks to enable you to get into the routine and allow you to regain your confidence.
Share Documents on the Cloud
A good piece of technical advice we can give you is to share your documents within the cloud. There are multiple benefits when it comes to this. Not only is it for just storing data but it allows you to share and organise your documents across different devices with ease (especially if you got a new device over your holiday 😉). This will enable you to save that extensive time taken on transferring data, leading you to focus on other tasks. Moreover, if you have cloud storage available and used department or organisation-wide, having shared cloud space allows you to efficiently see and share the work that has been completed or needs doing between colleagues. Whilst checking in and chatting with colleagues is a great way to ease back into the return to work, having to catch up exclusively on admin and document updates being kept on someone’s private device isn’t the most enjoyable or productive reintroduction to workplace nuances.
Remember and Look Forward to Future Breaks
Coming back to work after a break can be demotivating, especially after the Christmas period when the days are still dark and cold, but we can approach our return in a different way. Let the return be a motivator for your next holiday. It is a good technique to book your next time off so you have something to look forward to. We know that January and February can be difficult for some people so booking something now (even “staycations”) can be a welcome reward.
Overall, returning to the office after a long break is never easy. But it doesn’t always have to be difficult. As you resettle back into your routine, the sense of melancholy or anxiety will pass and you’ll soon be enjoying your work experience again. Restarting with technology after leaving it for a while doesn’t always have to be a struggle. Your experience can always be improved with many technologies and software. One solution that will allow you to be productive with your device as soon as possible is Nexthink. Do you want to learn more to make your return to the office a good experience? Book a demo with us or join us on our educational programs to learn more. We wish you a healthy and productive return to the office.