The Welcome Back Doormat Technique
A completely made up name for a simple yet effective and rarely used technique to improve your effectiveness and impact. Low cost, high returns.
Hello everyone,
Easter is just behind us; for some countries, it's a significant holiday break.
For me, it has been an opportunity to leverage a straightforward approach with huge upsides and no downsides, which I commonly use when people are on and off on different schedules.
This made me realise yet again how rarely I see other people follow the same approach, and I decided to share it with all my readers. I hope this inspires you all to adopt it, as it can go a long way in making you more remarkable at work and helping the overall organization run more efficiently.
The beauty of this approach is that it's not specific to any function or role. Anyone who works in a team can leverage it, meaning the vast majority of people out there.
I call it the Welcome Back Doormat message technique.
I hope you'll put this tip to good use.
The problem: post-break hangover
We're all familiar with the horrible hangover that follows the excitement of a long break, vacation, or paternity leave.
You come back to the (home) office.
You already know your first day will be spent digging through all those unread emails, Slack messages, comments on Notion and Google Docs, and notifications on Figma, GitHub, Miro, JIRA, Linear, and all the other SaaS tools with their red dots staring at you.
The worst part is that you know the vast majority of the information sitting there and screaming for your attention is stale, irrelevant, or simply noise. You can't know it for sure until you've processed the whole stream of information and built a mental map of the current state. Catch-22.
It's a bit like having to replay multiple weeks' worth of events from a diverse set of Kafka topics to catch up on the current state of your system. While machines are good at processing a massive amount of data to compute a consistent state, humans suck at it.
It's draining, time-consuming, and very error-prone.
How often have you replied to an email or commented on a document, only to find out a few minutes later that the whole conversation had been moved and solved in a Slack thread?
Furthermore, without additional context, it can be challenging to get a sense of the relative priorities of everything waiting for you: Should I focus on this document right now, or is there a ticking time bomb in my inbox I haven't discovered yet?
Wouldn't it be easier if you could find a snapshot of the current state of affairs, without having to reconstruct it by processing a bunch of unreliable ledgers?
Meeting with every single member of your team and your key stakeholders, including your manager, in the first few hours after a break would be a way to solve that issue… just a tad too selfish and inefficient. Not the most brilliant idea.
In reality, there is a more straightforward way to make the problem drastically simpler to deal with.
I bet that by this point, about 5% of the readers will have had a lightbulb moment and started engaging their minds on a promising, though maybe not the most original, startup idea: let's use AI for that! We could use LLMs to process the history of all unread messages from all tools, and then let them build an up-to-date view of the situation, ready for consumption. GPUs to the rescue, problem solved!
Well, maybe… but I know for a fact there's a better way. One that relies on that old-fashioned thing called a human brain. Insanely power efficient, highly creative, and slightly less prone to hallucinations.
If you're among that 5%, feel free to drop off and start vibe-coding your prototype.
For the remaining 95%, please read on.
Trying different approaches until one emerged
As I like to take extended breaks1, I found myself in that hangover situation way more often than I'd like to admit. I have had plenty of opportunities to experiment with common tactical approaches, such as:
Coming back to work in the middle of the week instead of on a Monday. It makes it easier to hit the ground running, but it only really helps with fatigue as you start with a shorter week. It allows you to get back in the rhythm more gently, but it doesn't make the task of catching up with the evolved context any easier.
Prioritize direct messages (DMs) and emails over group conversations. At some point, I thought that the critical topics would surface more easily in direct communications. I had assumed a higher signal-to-noise ratio in DMs compared to group chats, which is partly true. I've come to appreciate two significant problems with this approach, though. The first one is that the context of those conversations is often buried somewhere else, without direct links, which means you still need to filter out most of the noise to make sense of the interaction. Secondly, this approach implicitly prioritizes vocal people, those who tend to escalate or get annoyed quickly. There is no proven causal relationship between how vocal someone is and the importance of their needs.
Mark all as read and wait for someone to contact you again if something is worth your attention. I must confess I've never really tried this one. I still remember the conversation with a colleague who proudly told me this was their approach, but I've never dared to do it myself. I guess some roles are more conducive to this approach than others, and some people can deal with the anxiety better than others when they don't know what they don't know.
The list could go on, but none of these had any significant impact.
Until one day, a few years ago, when I tried something different.
At the time, I was in charge of the entire engineering team. I had multiple managers reporting to me and several peers with whom I interacted regularly to move things forward for the company, including the CEO.
Upon returning from a two-week break, I found myself tired of reading through the usual pile of stale messages, comments, and documents just less than an hour into the exercise. The perspective of spending the best part of the day just catching up wasn't the most compelling. That's when I decided to try a different approach.
Frustrated with the situation, I sent all my direct reports a message in the lines of this:
Hello {Name},
I just returned today from a two-week break, and I'm catching up with all the messages and threads that happened while I was away.
I want to be able to quickly focus on the most important, therefore I'd like to ask your a favour.
Could you please give me a bullet point summary of the main things that happened on your end while I was away? Things you believe I should be aware of.
Can you also let me know if there is any urgent or high-priority topic on your end that I should address as quickly as possible?
Please include links to the relevant document or Slack conversation if applicable.
After seeing the first useful replies from my team members, I quickly shared a similar version of the same message with all key Peers and my manager, the CEO.
What I experienced next was the highest signal-to-noise ratio I've ever seen when returning from an extended leave. After reading the answers to my request, I had achieved more than 80% of what I would have by reading through all the history: clarity on what mattered, what could wait, and what could be ignored entirely. After reading those dozen messages, I could safely go in and mark everything else as read without fear of missing out on anything important.
Taking it to the next level
In my role as a leader, making other people more effective is equally, if not more, important than making myself more productive. Upon realizing the first promising results, I decided to scale the approach to the rest of the organization.
In addition to using it to ease my way back into full productivity after a break, I started deploying the approach with my direct reports. Whenever they came back from leave, I'd drop a "welcome back" message in their Slack, focusing on the essential things that had happened that I thought they should know about, as well as expectations for where I wanted them to focus.
When something significant had happened, especially when joint problem-solving was required, the written summary was usually combined with a live 30-minute meeting that I would schedule in their calendars in advance.
This worked exceptionally well, and more than one person thanked me for the effort. Some were even a bit surprised that I took the time to get them on track on their first day back. On my side, I thought I was merely doing my job.
But it wasn't until I took it to the next level that I started doing my job exceptionally well. Well, at least one part of it. Let's take a step back first.
Our role as leaders has two key components, even though one isn't always evident.
The obvious part is that we're responsible for setting our team(s) up for success. I believe no reader would argue with that2.
The often forgotten part, though, is that we're also responsible for helping our manager succeed. A complete rationale about why is beyond the scope of this article. The simplest TL;DR would be: your manager's goals are your goals. If you help them succeed, you succeed. Simple, straightforward, yet often forgotten.
As I found it helpful to get distilled summaries of what would be worth my time and attention after a break, I assumed others would enjoy them too. Maybe they simply didn't know it yet.
That's why, when the opportunity presented itself, I decided to try doing just that. My CEO went on a paternity leave. On the day they came back, I wrote them the following message:
Hello {Name},
Welcome back, hope everything went well[…]3
I know how overwhelming it can be to come back from a break and face the amount of messages waiting for you. To make your life easier, this is a summary of the notable things that happened in and around the engineering team while you were out:
[Title of the event, followed by a detailed description with links to the relevant content where applicable]
[…]
From the Engineering perspective, these are the topics that I believe you should put your attention on first:
[Short title of the topic. Description with embedded links to the relevant threads or documents.]
[…]
Everything else is less important, and you can safely ignore it for now. Let me know if you have any questions; I'm happy to provide more details on anything unclear.
Welcome back!
It took me about 20 minutes to craft that message, and it probably saved the CEO hours of digging through irrelevant messages to find the same information. Not only that, they were also able to direct their attention where I needed it much faster.
Cherry on top: On our following one-to-one, the CEO expressed gratitude for thinking about making their life easier and taking the time to do it. Two things struck me in that conversation:
They had found the message very helpful and effective. It made their return to work much easier.
More surprisingly, I was the only one who thought about doing it.
Not only was I helping them do a better job, but I also gained in professional reputation. Double win!
Do try this at home!
Ever since that conversation, I've made it a habit of crafting structured, detailed, and informative welcome back messages for all the key people I work with: direct reports, peers, and managers.
It's still received with surprise more often than it should, and that's what convinced me to write today's article to promote this good practice.
Sometimes, a bit of discipline, consideration, and care can do wonders that no synthetic systems would match.
I recommend you start building this habit as follows:
Before taking a break, ask your team members to leave a recap message for you when you return. It helps to schedule an automated reminder for them the day before your return. Help them help you.
Whenever someone from your team is back from a break, take 15-20 minutes to craft a helpful welcome back message for them. It'll save them hours, and they'll appreciate your kind leadership.
Scale this approach up to your key peers in Product, HR, Finance, Marketing, and so on.
Last but not least, proactively do the same for your manager. It's even better if they didn't ask you to do so, as it'll show your ability to be proactive and empathetic.
It takes a bit of discipline and limited effort, but it has a massive ROI in terms of both first-order and second-order effects.
Try it and let me know how it goes!
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You should, too. Breaks have many benefits, one of them is testing the system in your absence. If you're having a hard time accepting that you simply need to rest, besides consulting with a therapist, you can tell yourself you're “chaos engineering” your organization by shutting down the instance of yourself that shows up at work.
I might be wrong, of course. So, if you want to argue, you're welcome to use the comments section!
Here I included a few sentences about the important family event, etc, that are very important if genuine. I'm just omitting them here as they're not relevant for the article.