Every year, the back-to-work period brings a spike in stress. Nearly one in two Belgian professionals returns to their job feeling anxious, without any HR tool picking it up. This spike almost always slips under the radar, buried under the logistics of the return: open recruitments to close, projects restarting, annual reviews to schedule. Yet this is precisely the right moment to trigger a structured listening exercise, rather than a survey planned six months later, once the spike has already faded, or settled in for good.

The reality: a stress spike that goes unnamed

47% of Belgian professionals say they feel stressed or anxious about returning to work after their summer holidays, with 15% describing themselves as "very anxious" (Source: Robert Walters Belgium). An overflowing inbox is the top stress factor, cited by 45% of respondents. A sign that this stress builds up even before the return: 65% of Belgian professionals check their work email during their holidays to soften the shock of coming back, and 56% sometimes postpone their leave days out of guilt or workload pressure.

What makes this figure interesting for employee engagement is its nature: unlike the individual signals a manager picks up over the course of the year (silence in meetings, repeated absences...), this one is collective and dated. Your entire organization goes through it at roughly the same time. It's a rare window where an engagement measurement has the best chance of revealing something real, because everyone is going through the same turning point at once.

Why this spike, if left unmeasured, settles in for good

The risk isn't that this back-to-work stress exists. It's that it's never measured, and quietly slides into something more chronic. Across Europe, 29% of workers report that their job has caused or worsened a state of stress, depression, or anxiety over the past 12 months, and 44% report high pressure linked to workload (Source: EU-OSHA, OSH Pulse 2025). These figures don't come from nowhere: they build up month after month, from stress spikes that were never resolved, like the one at the start of the school year.

Without measuring at the right time, an organization can't know whether its teams' stress naturally fades within a few weeks, or settles in. And that's precisely the question the annual review, scheduled months later, can no longer ask: the moment when it would have been most useful to ask it has already passed.

Pulse survey at the start of the school year: the right frequency, at the right time

A pulse survey launched within two to three weeks of the return captures an emotional state that's still fresh, before it dilutes into the rhythm of the year or turns into disengagement that's harder to name. It's the frequency and the timing that make the difference, not just the fact of surveying: a single annual survey measures a twelve-month average, a pulse survey measures a precise moment, the one where the signal is clearest.

Survey anonymity is what allows for an honest answer on a topic as personal as back-to-work stress. At eBloom, it's Julia, our AI, that then makes the difference for managers who are themselves in the thick of the return: she reads the verbatims, detects weak signals (for example, a rise in perceived mental load within a team even when overall scores look stable), and suggests concrete action points, without requiring hours of analysis from managers who don't have the time. But even before launching a pulse survey, there's a simpler first step: a genuine one-on-one conversation with each employee right at the return.

What now? Moving from insight to action

The start of the school year isn't just an HR calendar constraint. It's one of the key moments of the year to take your teams' pulse, before the stress spike dilutes into the rhythm of the year or settles in for good. So where to start? We've put together 12 ready-to-use questions, organized into 4 themes, to ask in one-on-one meetings within the first two weeks back.

👉 Download the free guide "Questions to ask your teams for a good restart"

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