Back to work after the summer: 10 recommendations to start September well

September is, year after year, the month when most people rethink their job. According to a LinkedIn analysis published in September 2024, six in ten people in Spain were considering changing employer before the end of the year, 15% more than the previous year. It is no coincidence that the peak lands on the return from holiday: when the rhythm of a break is cut short and the routine comes back all at once, everyone starts comparing.

For an employer, that turns the first two weeks of September into a critical moment. It is not just a matter of mood: it is turnover, lost productivity and the cost of refilling roles that were perfectly covered in July. The good news is that much of this attrition can be cushioned with concrete measures, and Spanish law already requires some of them.

Why September is when most employees think about leaving

A holiday works as a pause that lets people look at their job from the outside. During the year, momentum covers everything up; when that momentum stops for two or three weeks, the dissatisfaction that was already there before the summer does not disappear, it becomes visible. That is why September — and, to a lesser extent, January — concentrates the peaks in job applications and resignations.

The trigger is rarely the return itself. It is usually the contrast: going from a free rhythm to a rigid working day overnight, finding an inbox with three weeks of accumulated work, and realising that nobody planned for absorbing it. If the person was already carrying chronic overload or a lack of flexibility, the decision to leave stops being a vague idea.

What post-holiday syndrome is (and what it is not)

Post-holiday syndrome is not an illness and is not a clinical diagnosis: it is an adaptation process to going back to the routine. According to the Spanish Society of Family and Community Medicine (SEMFYC), it affects around 40% of the population, with a higher incidence among women.

The symptoms are recognisable: sadness, apathy, irritability, tiredness, difficulty concentrating, and disrupted sleep and appetite. In most cases they fade within a few days. Psychiatrist Víctor Navalón, of Hospital Vithas in Valencia, puts at 35% the share of people who carry symptoms for at least two weeks, with typical recovery at around 15 days when the return is managed gradually.

5 tips for employees

On an individual level, the return is far easier if you prepare for it a few days in advance instead of taking it head-on that first morning.

How to prepare your return

• Accept that the first days are for adapting: your body and your attention need a few days to get back up to speed. Demanding 100% of yourself from the first morning is the fastest route to frustration.
• Shift your schedule 2 or 3 days beforehand: gradually bring forward the time you get up, go to bed and eat. Arriving with your body clock already adjusted avoids the shock of day one.
• Leave a buffer day between travelling and starting work: getting back on Sunday night and clocking in at eight on Monday is the worst possible scenario. One day in between to unpack and catch up changes the experience entirely.
• Set small, realistic goals in the first week: prioritise three things a day instead of trying to empty the whole inbox. Visible progress is what gives you back the sense of control.
• Keep short breaks during the working day: a few minutes every hour and a half, standing up and eating lunch away from your desk sustain attention far better than a straight run on autopilot.

5 measures HR can put in place

The employer's side is, in fact, the decisive one. A person can prepare their own return, but they cannot decide on their own how three weeks of accumulated work gets shared out.

What the company can do in the first two weeks

• Stagger the workload: avoid stacking critical meetings, month-end closes and deliverables on day one. A two- or three-day ramp-up recovers more productivity than it appears to cost.
• Give real visibility of who is in: with absence management on the company calendar, the whole team can see who is back, who is still on holiday and who returns next week, and the work stops always landing on whoever arrives first.
• Allow flexible hours in the first days: some leeway on start time, or a compressed day during week one, sharply reduces the sense of shock at no cost to the business.
• Schedule a team session in the first week: a training session, a shared review of the quarter's objectives or a team-building activity restore the connection the summer has diluted.
• Centralise time tracking and absences in a single system: without knowing who has clocked in, how much holiday is still owed and who is carrying excess hours, any workload allocation is guesswork. Keeping time tracking next to absences answers all three questions at once.

Flexibility is not a favour: article 34.8 of the Workers' Statute

Many employers treat September flexibility as an exceptional concession. Spanish law frames it differently: since the reform introduced by Royal Decree-Law 6/2019, article 34.8 of the Workers' Statute recognises the right to request adaptations to the length and distribution of working time in order to make work-life balance effective.

Workers have the right to request adaptations to the length and distribution of the working day, to the organisation of working time and to the form in which work is performed, including remote working, in order to make effective their right to reconcile family and working life.

The procedure is prescribed too: the employer must open a negotiation process with the employee lasting a maximum of 15 days and reply in writing, either accepting the request, proposing an alternative, or refusing it on objective grounds. Ignoring the request is not a legally neutral option.

The return starts earlier: digital disconnection during the holidays

Much of a team's post-holiday syndrome is manufactured during the holiday itself. Someone who spent the break answering emails on the beach has not fully rested and comes back as tired as they left. That is why digital disconnection is not an optional wellbeing policy in Spain: it is a legal obligation.

Workers and public employees shall have the right to digital disconnection in order to guarantee, outside the legally or contractually established working time, respect for their rest time, leave and holidays, as well as for their personal and family privacy.

Paragraph 2 of the same article requires the employer to draw up an internal policy — after consulting the workers' legal representatives — defining how this right is exercised. And article 18 of Law 10/2021 on remote work reinforces it for people working from home, where the line between working time and personal life is thinnest. We cover this in detail in our article on time tracking for remote workers.

Badly planned holidays make for impossible Septembers

One organisational mistake explains much of the September collapse: not having the holiday calendar closed and visible. Article 38 of the Workers' Statute sets a minimum of 30 calendar days of annual leave and establishes that the calendar must be set within each company so that employees know their dates at least two months before the leave starts.

Common mistakes that make the return harder

• Approving holidays over email with no centralised record: nobody knows in advance how many days are left or whose leave overlaps with whose.
• Letting the whole team book the same fortnight because requests were approved first come, first served, with no overall view.
• Not planning who covers each role during an absence, which guarantees a backlog nobody has shared out.
• Leaving unused days unflagged: untaken holiday cannot be paid out while the contract is live, and it ends up causing sudden absences at year end.
• Not recording working time over the summer because 'hardly anyone is in': the obligation in article 34.9 of the Workers' Statute has no low season, and breaching it is a serious offence carrying up to €7,500 per worker.

If you want to estimate your company's real exposure, you can use our penalty calculator.

The return is also an occupational health and safety matter

It is easy to forget that managing workload is not just good management practice: it is a prevention duty. Law 31/1995 on the prevention of occupational risks lists adapting the work to the person among the principles of preventive action, and psychosocial risks — mental load, work pace, working time — must form part of the risk assessment required by article 16.

To adapt the work to the person, in particular as regards the design of workplaces and the choice of work equipment and of working and production methods, with a view in particular to alleviating monotonous and repetitive work and reducing its effects on health.

Not carrying out the risk assessment, or carrying it out while ignoring psychosocial factors, is a serious offence in prevention terms, with fines ranging from €2,451 to €49,180 depending on the degree. Far above any saving made by not reorganising September's workload.

How to manage the return to routine with Horalia

Almost every measure above depends on one very concrete thing: having the information before you need it. Knowing who returns on which day, how much holiday is still pending, who is carrying excess hours and who closed the summer with a negative balance. That is exactly what Horalia solves.

Everything you need to plan September

• Shared absence calendar: who is on holiday, who is back and when, visible to the whole team and two months in advance, as article 38 of the Workers' Statute requires.
• Holiday requests and approvals from the app, with the remaining-days balance updated automatically and reminders about unused days before the year ends.
• Overlap control: alerts when several people from the same team request the same fortnight, avoiding the cover gap that gets paid for in September.
• Real-time hours balance, so you can spot who is carrying excess hours before it turns into sick leave or a resignation.
• Clocking in from mobile, browser or a fixed terminal, compatible with flexible schedules and compressed days, so offering flexibility in September does not mean losing control of working time.
• Working time and absenteeism reports to see how the team evolves through the weeks after the break, with records kept for the 4 years the law requires.

The same platform gives you absence and holiday management, time tracking, schedules and calendars, shift planning and document management with electronic signature, handy for getting the digital disconnection policy signed without printing anything. If absenteeism is your main concern, you may also want to read our article on how to reduce workplace absenteeism. You can try Horalia for free before the next September arrives.