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What to Consider When Returning to In-Person Work Settings

Tips for employers and employees.

Key points

  • Employers and employees can assure better health and performance by bringing intention to the transition to in-person work.
  • While business moves back to in-person workspaces, an acknowledgment of the psychological dynamics can improve outcomes.
  • Reconfiguring workspaces to support safety and a sense of community will help employees feel connected to their work and each other.
  • It will be wise for everyone to have a plan about how to weather the inevitable missteps and failures of re-entering the workplace.
Photo by Edmond Dantès from Pexels
Source: Photo by Edmond Dantès from Pexels

Let's address the psychological and business realities employers and employees face as they return to in-person work settings. As we return, here are some things to keep in mind.

Recognizing the Importance of Vocation and Workplace Settings to Mental Health

Long before the pandemic required a majority of workers to migrate their offices to their homes, researchers were finding that “fast-paced work, continuous demand to learn and use newer technologies1, 2, 3 and reduced people interaction [were] all causing significant stress on employees, placing higher demands on employees’ well-being, and in turn, on the health and efficacy of organizations.” 4 It’s fair to say that the race to find new ways of doing business when quarantine orders rolled out required everyone to learn and use new technologies and reduced people interaction in profound ways. All workers and businesses will feel the cost of this.

Research suggests a strong and significant negative correlation between job satisfaction and psychological distress as evidenced by insomnia, depression, anxiety, and hostility. This means that individuals reporting dissatisfaction at work experience higher levels of psychological symptoms than those who claim higher satisfaction at work.

This is important to pay attention to at individual and corporate levels. When we feel satisfied at work, we gain a sense of accomplishment and meaning. These are part of our “pay,” so to speak. When we don’t feel satisfied, we pay a personal price by experiencing distress. Corporately, high job satisfaction in individual workers can be an important predictor of the overall health and productivity of organizations. When workers are satisfied the business thrives.

The pandemic has had a severe impact on people’s relationship to the work they do, how they do it, and how they interact with their peers. For those who thrive in team settings, the loss of the dynamic energy of a people-filled workspace has been profound, leading many to dislike work that they previously enjoyed. For those who prefer autonomous work within the context of others, the need to schedule meetings and hold them via video chat, as opposed to consulting in organic and spontaneous ways, may have taken an emotional toll.

Owning that our work feeds our sense of well-being as much as it does our bank account is crucial for understanding the profound way in which our return to an entirely altered work reality might impact us. Keeping an eye focused on our level of psychological distress in relation to our work will help us address issues that might lead to psychological symptoms early enough to prevent them from taking root.

Acknowledging What Is Lost and the Grief That Results

In returning to offices, there will be profound losses in the kinds of experiences we might expect to have at work. Any ease and familiarity we enjoyed in our workplaces before the pandemic will likely be impacted by the need to maintain distance and retain a certain vigilance about shared spaces. This, in and of itself, comes with a price. Days that were previously peppered with lighthearted interactions, casual social interaction, or meaningful banter will now be infused with a carefulness that could easily disrupt calm.

It’s important to grieve the losses inherent in all of this. Grief isn’t an emotion that simply goes away. Unacknowledged and unexpressed, it can have a serious impact on our mental health. If we can, both individually and corporately, acknowledge the feelings associated with that which is different and/or missing in our workspaces as we return, and provide space for supportive grieving, we are much more likely to withstand the return to our new normal without experiencing psychological distress.

To do this, it’s important to be forthright and honest about the personal disappointments that will result from instituting changes that require a certain level of vigilance and isolation in the workplace. Instead of trying to “rally the troops” and “get them excited about the new workplace,” managers and executives will be better served by facilitating openhearted conversations wherein they acknowledge the real losses that they are asking their employees to endure. This need not be a dramatic process but rather can include an acknowledgment followed by expressions of empathy and appreciation.

It’s important to recognize that a proportion of the workforce will face feelings of grief in being asked to return to physical workplaces. Many people have enjoyed working from home and have made significant investments in making this work. Whether these are monetary (investing in office furniture, etc.), relational (working from home has significantly increased the time spent with partners and/or family given the loss of commute time, etc.), or primarily personal (work from home allows fewer distractions than a shared workspace, etc.), the loss of these secondary payoffs is real and deserves to be grieved.

Acknowledging the Habits That Work-From-Home Has Created and Reinforced

It’s hard to fathom the number of changes to a “normal” workday that the pandemic has forced, with myriad small rituals and routines tossed aside the instant the world shut down and we began working from home. Where we would normally have risen and dressed, engaged in rituals around making coffee or tea, and then stepped outside to walk, pedal, or drive to work or school, we suddenly became able to roll out of bed and into a meeting. We only needed to be half-dressed and, when breaks came, we toggled from our work screens to the online spaces that entertained or informed us without ever moving from our seats. When the end of the workday hit, we did the same, never really marking time with the kind of meaningful rituals that would significantly tip our bodies off to the need for rest or transition. For some, their performance dropped altogether. For others, their work knew no bounds.

For many people, this meant that geographic spaces once demarcated specifically for rest and family time (homes) were no longer spaces dedicated to and saved for non-work-related activities. Not only were home interiors changed, but the introduction of desks and monitors and all other manners of office equipment blurred the lines between work and home in a way that will be hard to come back from.

We must also acknowledge that moving work to home offered new opportunities for multitasking that may have added to our sense of overwhelm. Simply because we could do laundry between meetings or fix dinner or work out while on calls, we did, and we embraced this ability with abandon.

This blurring of lines between work and home life has taken a toll and will continue to do so. Employees will be entering the workplace with varying levels of insight about this. Some will have worked through the way in which they will manage the shift back to commutes and shared space but others will not and may not be able to keep up the pace expected of them when they were working at home. This creates an elevated risk of rises in work-related stress, which could, eventually, harm workers and the larger workspace.

Adjusting Relational Expectations Given New Standards and Requirements

Very frequently, work settings offer the fringe benefit of social opportunities. Whether these occur around the (proverbial or actual) watercooler or in meeting rooms or they transfer out to offerings such as work league sports teams or volunteer shifts, at least some of our coworkers are likely also our friends. The opportunity to re-gather in person at work, then, is likely a cause for celebration for many. For this group of people, adjusting to the new realities of the workplace may be difficult. With breakrooms off-limits and distancing measures in place, it may feel awkward to be back in physical proximity of others without being able to resume pre-pandemic types of connectivity.

As employers reconfigure workspaces, they would do well to keep this in mind. In climates where outdoor tables and chairs could offer appropriately distanced and ventilated space for small groups of coworkers to congregate, they would be a helpful addition. In settings where breakrooms and a kitchen previously offered up shared snacks, creating individually wrapped offerings might maintain the feeling of community while also honoring safety protocols. Anything that approximates an embodied sense of community will help employees feel connected to their work and each other.

Offer Direct Support

The fact is that, no matter how much preparation employers and employees do as they re-enter more widely shared spaces, everyone is likely to experience distress and missteps. Someone is going to be so lost in glee about seeing their former colleagues that they go in for a handshake or hug without gaining consent. Another will joke about “this nightmare finally being over” to a coworker who lost a parent to the virus. Employers will fail to reinforce safety guidelines and employees will feel stress about how to deal with this without support, and so on.

It will be wise for each of us to have a plan about how we will weather the inevitable foibles and failures of re-entering the workplace. For those in positions of leadership, the establishment of clearly communicated guidelines by which people can register concerns will be necessary for all parties to feel safe in navigating the murky waters of re-establishing norms. Non-reactive yet appropriately attentive responses to expressions of discomfort or reports of missteps will ensure that all voices are heard. These will take effort to create and establish.

Individual employees returning to workplaces would also do well to do a bit of planning. Determining, ahead of time, what one is and is not comfortable with, how and where to register concerns, and who they can go to if they feel at risk will help employees be ready to step back into the workplace with relative confidence.

Excerpt from Restart: Designing a Healthy Post-Pandemic Life.

References

1 Jean Spencer, “Checklists for Reopening Business after COVID-19,” Workest, May 7, 2020, https://www.zenefits.com/workest/checklists-for-reopening-business-afte….

2 David M. DeJoy et al., “Assessing the Impact of Healthy Work Organization Intervention,” Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology 83, no. 1 (2010): 139–165, https://doi.org/10.1348/096317908x398773.

3 Angele Farrell and Patricia Geist-Martin, “Communicating Social Health,” Management Communication Quarterly 18, no. 4 (2005): 543–92, https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318904273691.

4 Kate Sparks, Brian Faragher, and Cary L. Cooper, “Well‐Being and Occupational Health in the 21st Century Workplace,” British Psychological Society (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, December 16, 2010): 489–509, https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1348/096317901167….

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