Re-entry anxiety is real. Employees, already burned out by pandemic-related stress and workplace pressure, are now grappling with anxiety around returning to in-person work.

This stressed-out workforce brings with it steep costs. According to a report from Deloitte UK, absenteeism, presenteeism (underperforming while at work due to illness), and worker turnover due to mental health increased 25 percent from 2019, costing an estimated £53 to £56 billion ($67 to $70 billion) in 2020-2021. 

Still, only 34 percent of employees say their companies’ leadership speaks openly about mental health, according to Mental Health America’s “Mind the Workplace 2022 Report: An Employer’s Responsibility to Employee Mental Health.”

We went to Care first, a UK-based provider of employee assistance programs whose clients include BBC, The Royal Household, Pret A Manger, and Lloyds of London, and asked Karl Bennett, former business director at Care first and now Wellbeing Director for Vivup, how employers can help employees build up their resilience during this unprecedented time.

What issues are employees grappling with as they return to work? What should employers be aware of?  

Work control

 “Employees are not sure whether they’re going to be coming back into the office, whether they’re going to be working from home, or whether they will be adopting the hybrid model. If people don’t feel they’ve got control of where they’re working from, that can really increase anxiety.”

Work relationships

 “In some instances, employees may not have met some of their colleagues. There’s anxiety around how they’re going to get on, how it’s all going to fit. They’ve almost got to relearn how to work within an office environment after being out of it for so long.” 

Managing home life

“During the pandemic, people’s lives changed. They had babies or adopted dogs, so there is concern about leaving family, friends, pets, and children. At the moment, it is an employee’s market. There is a lot of job availability, so employees can speak to recruitment agencies, they can look for new jobs. And, of course, that is going to be causing employers some concern.” 

Cost of living

“The cost of living has increased significantly–everything, fuel, utilities, food, heating. In some instances, people have to make a choice between driving somewhere or having a meal. While for others, it’s not catastrophic, maybe they aren’t going to be able to shop at a posh supermarket. While that might not be a big deal, it impacts them. It means that they don’t have control of where they get their food.”

Are there any best practices you recommend to employers?

Empower

“Many of the organizations we work with say that they’re going to be sending questionnaires out to employees to identify what they’re looking for. People become anxious or worried because they don’t have control. Employers giving people the opportunity to have some control over their fate regarding where they will be working is one way that employers can support them.”

Acknowledge and educate

“Acknowledge that it’s okay for employees to feel concerned or anxious about coming to work or back into the workplace. Talk to them about the physical symptoms of anxiety—the tight chest and the twisting in the tummy. Care first produces webinars to support both employees and their managers. We’re making sure that we’re communicating everything we can quickly.”

Promote, promote, promote

“It’s really important. You can have services, like EAPs, like benefit platforms, but if employees don’t know they exist, then people can spiral. And the messaging has to be constant so that on the day a person needs support, they know where to find it. I find testimonials from people who’ve used the services work really well, a thousand times better than a statistic telling somebody that one to five people find that the service helps them.”

Be proactive

“If you can identify issues before they become a crisis, then you are way ahead of the game. EAPs are hugely beneficial to people, but people have to know they need them. The big benefit of using apps such as Woebot is you can start engaging people in a proactive, preventative manner before they realize they need help, which means they may not need to pick up the phone and speak to somebody to support them through a crisis.” 

Keep them engaged

“Those apps must be engaging. And that’s what Woebot does so brilliantly. It supports people through conversation, something that people of all ages can actually buy into quite quickly. You don’t have to put in tons of information to get a result. You don’t get a list of 20 questions for the app to say, ‘You might have mild depression or anxiety. Please read this article or watch this video.’ That isn’t conversational anymore; it’s instructional. And while Woebot teaches CBT skills and support mechanisms, it doesn’t shout about that fact. Instead, it recognizes that people are real and have real lives with real jobs and real issues. And it does it by saying things in real terms and making things short and snappy so that people will return to it again and again.”