Energy at work: is a holiday really enough?

The first days of a holiday sometimes show just how far energy at work had drained away. A summer break restores resources that had become scarce, but the effect can fade quickly when going back to work restores exactly the same conditions.

Protecting your energy at work therefore means looking beyond rest, and identifying what in the job itself sustains engagement — and what burns through recovered resources within weeks.

Getting your energy back is not the same as keeping it

Time off puts distance between you and the work, and lets you recover. But when the same constraints return, the resources you regained can drain away fast.

An HR manager can come back rested after several weeks off and find her days immediately dominated by urgency. The rest did its work, but the conditions that consume her energy are unchanged.

So it is worth separating one-off recovery from lasting protection of your energy, which also depends on the nature of the work and how it is organised.

To understand why some work drains you faster than other work, volume is not enough. You have to look at what it calls on in the person doing it.

Not all work draws on our energy in the same way

Two pieces of work of comparable length or difficulty can have very different effects from one person to the next. An intense day can be stimulating, while a task someone has fully mastered can leave a deeper tiredness behind.

That difference comes down to what people are genuinely drawn to: the pleasure someone takes in certain work, and their capacity to sustain it with energy over time.

A task you have mastered can still be draining when it holds no interest and no pleasure. Conversely, demanding work can be energising when it matches what the person is drawn to.

Skill tells you what someone can do; it does not always reveal what it costs them in energy. The Map & Match approach adds that reading through Energy Skills™, which make visible the contributions a person naturally enjoys making and can sustain over time.

A project manager known for her rigour may be called on constantly for operational follow-up, when she draws far more energy from designing solutions or bringing the team together.

The point is not to remove the work people enjoy less, but to check how much of the role it takes up, and how the team could share it better.

Using the summer to read your energy at work

The summer break offers useful distance for looking at your relationship with work — without turning the holiday into another exercise in introspection.

Some signals appear before you even leave: work you keep putting off, a persistent difficulty in switching off, an effort that has become disproportionate. When the pressure drops, it becomes easier to notice what comes back to mind spontaneously — wanting to get back to certain projects, or dreading certain parts of the role.

Those observations help separate the possible sources of tiredness at work: a volume that has become excessive, an unsustainable organisation, or work that is simply costly to carry. The answers differ according to the cause.

Cross mastery with the effect on your energy

For each significant piece of work, two things can be examined: how well you master it and what it does to your energy.

Work that is mastered and energising is generally a contribution to make the most of. Work that is not yet mastered but is stimulating may point to potential worth developing.

What deserves closer attention is work that is done well but stays draining. The results can hide the effort it takes. And work that is both poorly mastered and highly draining may call for support, redistribution, or a rethink of its place in the role.

A few questions are enough to make that clear:

• Do I master this work at the level expected?
• Do I genuinely enjoy it?
• What effect does it have on my energy?
• How much of my role does it take up?
• Could someone else carry it more naturally?

That last question opens the collective conversation. A team has to cover everything a project needs. Complementarity is what lets contributions be shared with skills, appetites and each person's energy all taken into account.

Protecting energy at work is a management question too

Advice on recovery usually concerns each person's ability to switch off. It falls short when the tiredness comes from how the work is shared out.

Look beyond the results

Someone can hit their objectives while spending far too much energy getting there. Results do not always say whether the work is sustainable.

A manager can go further by looking at what the person succeeds at, but also at what it costs them and which contributions energise them most.

A conversation on their return can bring out the responsibilities that have become particularly costly, and those the person would like to take on more. A few adjustments in how the work is shared are sometimes enough to rebalance a role.

Organise complementarity

A team has to be able to initiate, deliver, enrich, steer and connect. When most of those contributions rest on one person, tiredness becomes a collective issue.

A manager may end up holding the trade-offs, the tracking and the relationship with leadership. A holiday lets them recover, but that energy drains fast if every decision still comes back to them.

Reading the collective dynamics can reveal that some of those contributions match what other members of the team are drawn to. Giving them more responsibility makes better use of their talents and reduces the dependence on the manager.

Complementarity covers the project's needs better, and spreads energy more sustainably across the team.

Holidays restore energy, work is what protects it

Holidays let you get your energy back. Whether you keep it depends on what the work asks of people, and on how much room is given to the contributions that genuinely stimulate them.

Aligning what people are drawn to, their roles and what the team needs is what supports more durable engagement and performance spread more evenly across the team.

To start that conversation, discover your three main Energy Skills™ and identify the contributions you naturally bring with the most energy.