Ask most people what they think about on the last day of a holiday, and the answer usually isn't the beach, or the flight home. It's the inbox. According to new research Zoom published on September 1, that dread is now measurable, widespread, and shaping whether people take their annual leave at all.
The Out of Office Index, a Morning Consult study commissioned by Zoom, surveyed 1,000 US knowledge workers and 500 IT decision-makers and found that 61% dread the work piled up after paid time off, while 48% feel anxious before they've even left the office. More strikingly, 68% would rather quietly monitor their inbox during the holiday than come back to hundreds of unread messages, and 57% left some of their PTO unused over the past year.
The return from leave has become a workplace design problem
The numbers point to something closer to a structural issue than individual bad habits. Nearly two-thirds of workers say unread messages are a direct source of stress once they're back, 88% need at least a full day to recover from the transition, and just over half need three days or more before they feel caught up.
Younger workers appear to feel this hardest. Among Gen Z respondents, 52% report anxiety before time off, 52% have considered skipping a holiday altogether because of work stress, and 65% left PTO unused in the past year, all notably above the wider sample.
Managers aren't exempt either. Over half feel anxious before stepping away, 70% put in extra hours beforehand to clear the decks, and 60% left leave unused. The knock-on effect lands on their teams too: 71% of workers say they at least sometimes experience delays when a colleague is out, and 75% say work tied to a specific person stalls for a day or more in their absence.
Taking time off should give people room to recharge, yet many workers spend their vacation worrying about what will be waiting when they return.
That's Whitney Magnuson, Zoom's Head of Brand Strategy and Activation, framing the tension the study set out to quantify: employees want real disconnection, but fear the cost of it.
Why Zoom is positioning AI as the answer, and why that's not new
Zoom's answer is a set of features built on ZoomMate, the agentic AI product it took to general availability back in June. The new Out of Office Workflows include a "While I'm Out" canvas for organising open projects before someone leaves, a "Welcome Back" tool that scans meetings, documents and Zoom Chat threads to build a prioritised first-day plan, a missed-messages digest with suggested replies, and an action-item triage split into Do Today, Delegate, Defer and Done.
It's a logical extension of where Zoom has been pushing ZoomMate since launch, positioning it as the layer that closes what the company calls "handoff gaps" between conversation and action. But it also lands squarely inside a wider trend across the UC&C market. Microsoft rolled its own scattered recap tools into a single dedicated Meeting Recap app in Teams back in June, and its broader pitch for Microsoft 365 Copilot in Teams already leads with helping late joiners and returning staff catch up on decisions and action items without re-reading a chat history. Catching people up on what they missed has effectively become the default entry point vendors use to sell AI into a collaboration stack, whether that gap is a single missed meeting or two weeks away.
Zoom's own numbers support the demand side of that pitch. Among the workers surveyed, 82% want AI to summarise what they missed, 80% want automatic recaps of decisions made in their absence, and 79% want an AI-generated to-do list for their first day back. On the buying side, 76% of IT decision-makers say they plan to invest in productivity and work-continuity tools over the next 12 months, which tracks with how aggressively both Zoom and Microsoft have built out this category over the past year.
AI can shrink the inbox, but it doesn't address why people fear leaving it in the first place
Where the study gets more interesting is in what it implies AI can't fix on its own. Workers aren't just anxious about the volume of messages waiting for them, they're anxious about being seen as disconnected, replaceable, or behind. Zoom's own figures show 78% would be more likely to fully disconnect if AI reliably caught them up, and 76% say they'd use more of their available leave under the same condition. That's a meaningful claim, but it assumes the anxiety is purely informational rather than cultural.
That distinction matters for buyers evaluating this category. A tool that compresses two weeks of missed context into a ranked to-do list solves a real logistical problem. It does less to touch the underlying expectation, reported elsewhere across UC vendors' own research, that availability itself is what gets rewarded. If a returning employee still feels pressure to have been reachable throughout their leave, an AI-generated Day 1 plan changes how fast they catch up, not whether they felt safe stepping away in the first place.
For IT and collaboration leads assessing tools in this space, the practical test isn't whether the AI summarises well. It's whether rolling it out changes actual PTO usage and manager behaviour, the numbers this survey shows are currently moving in the wrong direction, rather than just making the backlog easier to read.
