Employees are finally heading back to the office, but the very thing they’ve been anticipating all year could also be causing a lot of stress.
While mental health improved slightly earlier in the year,
“What we're responding to is change,” says Dr. Rachelle Scott, a psychiatrist and medical director of psychiatry at Eden Health. “We're going back to what it was before, but we're still anxious about it. So when I’m talking to employers, how do we reframe [returning to work] and think about what it is that we're gaining?”
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Despite the potential benefits of office re-openings — increased socialization, productivity and collaboration — the shift back to an office space, whether it’s hybrid or not, is weighing heavily on employees' shoulders, Dr. Scott says.
“Think back to how long it took to adjust working from home,” she says. “Use that as an estimate. Reflect on the past year and use what we've learned about ourselves and about what makes us comfortable.”
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Where is this return-to-work anxiety stemming from?
It took us some time to adjust to working from home. And then we figured out there were other things that we really liked about it and we kind of developed these schedules and routines. And so now the idea of going back to work, it's like ‘Oh no I forgot what that's like to be in person — I've got to create this whole routine, I've got to create the structure.’
There's also a component to the anxiety about going back to work is not about work — it's also about life and balance. For a lot of parents or caregivers, they’ve created this routine. They have this support and they have the schedule and so some of the anxiety is just about ‘What's going to happen to my home life?’
How should an employee go about returning to work if they're feeling anxious or nervous?
Communication is key. There are different ways to return to the office — for some people, employers are looking at starting part-time and easing their way into it. The logistics and the basics are key. Where are the expectations in terms of how many days a week do [they] have to go in? What will those hours look like? Is it going to be all at once? What has the company done in terms of making sure that physically it's safe?
Those are certain things that can be communicated ahead of time and will help ease anxiety for those returning. It's important for employees to know who they can ask — not everybody's coming in at the same level of anxiety, so if you're somebody who had been working at the company for years and you've developed relationships ahead of time with coworkers, you might have one experience, versus somebody who maybe started remotely and hasn't met anybody in person. Employers can think about how to create a buddy system with smaller circles so people have an opportunity to get to know each other ahead of time.
What are some things that employers can do to facilitate the process?
Acknowledge that people are going to feel anxious and it's okay. Have that conversation and hold that space so people can feel comfortable voicing their opinions — and identify who people can connect to and who they can reach out to when they're not sure is also going to be very important. I tell employers to survey to get a sense of where people are at so they have a baseline and come up with a game plan ahead of time.
Have employees think about what their boundaries and what their needs are ahead of time, because a lot of times we don't really think about that before going into a situation. Everybody's in the same boat, nobody's really a hundred percent sure. So acknowledging that there's going to be a period of adjustment and that's OK. That's normal.
How will navigating return-to-work change employee and employer relationships?
Before the pandemic I would show up to work and that was Rochelle at work or Dr. Scott at work. You may or may have known something about my personal life depending on who you were. Working from home certainly opened people into your homes — it humanized us. In a way, it really allowed people to show their full selves. That will have a positive impact on relationships between employers and employees, because we have that shared experience.
There is something about having a shared experience that gives people a grounding that allows them to have more open communications than before. Before, everybody had a different situation and we didn't necessarily have that commonality or that point of reference. Employers and employees will have a different relationship going back, and I think it'll be because of the pandemic and the experience of working from home and seeing more of ourselves holistically.
