Thursday · 23 January 2020

Coming back after a long absence

Posted by Call In Sick Tips Revealed · Filed under Rest and Wellbeing · Permalink

A return after weeks or months away is a different event from a return after a Tuesday off, and treating it as the same thing is the most common way it goes wrong. The work has moved, the people have partly changed, and the returning person is expected to absorb all of that while also being watched.

The practical difficulties are mundane and cumulative. Systems have been updated, access has expired, decisions have been taken that nobody thinks to explain because they are now simply how things are. None of this is anybody's fault and all of it costs the returning person a great deal of energy in the first week, at exactly the point when energy is scarcest.

The catch-up meeting that does not happen

The single most useful arrangement is boring: an hour with somebody whose job that morning is to explain what changed. Not a welcome, not a review, an explanation. Organisations that do this find the first week goes markedly better; organisations that do not tend to discover the gaps one embarrassment at a time over the following month.

The second most useful arrangement is a written plan for the build-up, agreed before the return date rather than on it. Days, hours, which duties resume when, and a scheduled point at which the plan is reviewed rather than allowed to lapse silently into the old workload.

The question of what to tell colleagues

Long absences attract curiosity, and the returning person is usually the one managing it. It helps enormously if a single agreed line has been settled in advance with the manager and communicated to the team, so that the same explanation is not given fourteen times to fourteen people.

What that line contains is the returning person's decision alone. There is no obligation to disclose a reason, and a workplace that treats the absence of an explanation as suspicious will simply receive fictional ones. The manager's job here is to protect the boundary, not to establish the facts.

A return handled well tends to be quiet: a plan, an explanation, a review date, and no ceremony. Most of the ways it goes badly come from improvising something that could have been arranged in twenty minutes a week earlier.