Problèmes des vacances d'été

So you are lying on a sandy beach, the sun is high in the sky, and the latest in a succession of long, cool cocktails is heading lazily in your direction. Back in the office, meanwhile, your in-tray overflows, urgent memos remain unsent, and a backstabbing colleague uses your absence to weasel his way in with the boss. You watch the seabirds float nonchalantly above, but behind the designer shades all you can see are the vultures picking at the bones of your once brilliant career.

It's coming up to the peak holiday season and many office workers are worried. They are worried about the extra work they will have to finish before they go, so they don't burden already over-stretched colleagues. They are worried about the extra hours they will have put in when they get back, just to catch up. And if they are not worried about that, they are worried that the only solid two weeks they have off in a year will prove just how dispensable they are.

Welcome to the long, lazy days of high summer, the most stressful two months of the office year.

Few companies have the spare capacity to cope comfortably with the annual summer migration of staff. As a result, many employees assume their two weeks of sun and sand will have to be "justified" by hours of unpaid overtime in the period before and after their holiday. Psychologist Bee Patel says it's a feeling that leaves many dreading the stress of the holiday season. "That knowledge - that there will inevitably be a heavy workload which will involve long hours at work - results in anxious feelings about taking the holiday in the first place, and it can sometimes have a lingering effect on the holiday as well."

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Nicola, 32, works in the offices of a small new media company, and spends her annual Italian fortnight recovering from the previous two weeks and worrying about the next. "I have to work really hard before I leave to make sure I'm on top of my work, so I'm exhausted for the first few days of the holiday. Then you can't completely relax when you know that the work is piling up back home. Last year I remember waking up in the night thinking, 'They're having that meeting today - I should be there.'"

And worse still, these fears are leading many employees to eschew the traditional summer holiday altogether. In a survey published last month by Royal & Sun Alliance almost a third of the workers polled said they would prefer to trade in some of their holiday entitlement for other benefits such as a car allowance or gym membership. One in three men and one in six women said that they were too busy to go away. Many employees are so anxious about their workload that they would prefer not to take a well-deserved summer break at all.

According to Dr Barbara Moses, president of BBM Human Resource Consultants and author of What Next? (Dorling Kindersley, £14.99), a decade of downsizing is making a taboo of prolonged absence from work - even when it's richly earned. "Taking a vacation used to be so simple," she says. "You booked your time off, and away you went. But in today's time-urgent, compressed workplace, what was once an easy decision is fraught with complexity.

"Some people seem afraid to take

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