It's that time of year again. Diaries start filling up, out-of-office replies are switched off, and everyone drifts back into the same rooms they were in before the summer. Except it isn't quite the same. Everyone's had different weeks over the summer.
Image: Barbara Olsen, Pexels
Some of us had proper unstructured time - I definitely did. Some others didn’t take time off or didn’t switch off at all. A few came back to work to a completely different set of priorities than the ones they left behind. But in most workplaces, we rarely acknowledge this. We just... resume. Same meetings, same working assumptions. Which feels a little like, "right, where were we before we were interrupted?"
And that’s a challenge when we rely on collaboration but we don't talk about the assumption that alignment between people will resume just as it was. We assume it’ll survive a big break. I've seen that it doesn’t.
Teams don't stop working because people stop getting on. They fall apart in small, quite unremarkable ways because everyone's working from a slightly different starting point and nobody's actually said that out loud.
One person has come back to work determined to protect their time better. Another's walked straight back into old habits. And another has had a summer of challenging family ‘stuff’ that they haven't mentioned to anyone.
We might not talk about any of that, but it can all show up in different ways. Replies might be slower, decisions stall and a meeting that should take twenty minutes takes over an hour.
This links to something I talked about in a previous post – we don’t make enough space to notice what’s going on for us, never mind what’s going on for people around us.
September makes this gap much more visible. A team that hasn't taken the time to re-negotiate how it's going to work together isn't broken. It's running on the settings from last term.
If we want to fix things, it’s not about a big reset or an awayday (that we don’t have time for). Instead, try finding time to genuinely ask the question, “how are you coming back to work?”, with honest answers, before life gets too busy. This can be enough.
So, before you all dive back into your (frantic) working rhythm, has anyone actually asked how everyone's turning up?