Balancing Employee Mental Health With the Return to Office Trend

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At first glance, some workplace trends for 2025 appear to be contradictory—namely the continued expansion of return to office policies combined with a | SUCCESS

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A woman sits at her desk while on a zoom meeting.

At first glance, some workplace trends for 2025 appear to be contradictory—namely the continued expansion of return to office policies combined with a growing interest in employee mental health. In a McKinsey survey from 2021, one-third of respondents reported that returning to the office negatively affected their mental health.

Finding the proper balance between these potentially competing priorities is likely to be a challenge for bosses and workers alike. Human resources expert Paul Wolfe, author of Human Beings First: Practices for Empathetic, Expressive Leadership, is predicting that both trends will continue to grow this year. He has some advice for those who will be navigating the two issues.

The coronavirus pandemic brought mental health into the limelight, prompting corporate leaders to focus on the integrated wellbeing of their employees. Wolfe, who’s an advocate for human-first leadership, was the chief human resources officer at Indeed at the time.

“One of the first things we did was take, I don’t know, a million dollars out of a wellness campaign that we had going on because we weren’t in the office anymore, and put it into mental health,” he says. “And I’m happy to say, I left two-plus years ago now, [but] that is still something they invest in. Because they realize, as a company, it’s important to… support your employees in the right way.”

While mental health is getting more attention in the workplace, it’s still a long way off from full acceptance. And although the current openness may have been unheard of a decade ago, Wolfe notes that we’re still 10 to 20 years away from normalizing the conversation—making it all the more important that leadership continue to prioritize the psychological wellbeing of employees.

The ability of employees to choose when and where they work has been shown to result in happier workers. Unsurprisingly, those who are forced to return to the office report lower job satisfaction and are more likely to quit. So what’s behind the push for returning to the office?

“We had that old paradigm for so long. And I do think that a lot of CEOs or executive teams are making the decision to go back to what they know when they’re comfortable with [it], because it’s been around for so long and it worked,” Wolfe says.

Still, as he points out, it wasn’t ideal for everyone. Thirty-four percent of office workers who responded to a 2023 survey from The Conference Board said that their mental health had declined over the previous six months. Nearly half said that it could be improved by returning to fully remote work while 52% reported that a hybrid or flexible schedule would make a difference.

While this does not prove definitively that return to office (RTO) mandates will cause a decline in mental health, it does suggest that the lack of flexibility, self-determination and loss of work-life balance associated with losing the option to work from home could have a negative psychological impact on employees that employers are not taking into account.

For leaders who want to enact RTO policies while also prioritizing employee mental health, Wolfe emphasizes the importance of data, transparency and flexibility. He says that when he reads articles about companies going back to the office, they talk about it being in the interest of culture, collaboration or mentorship. “But they were never measuring that before. They weren’t measuring it during the pandemic. And they’re not coming out and saying how they’re going to measure it [going forward].”

This is why he recommends leaders choose a few data points to continually measure the goals they expect to achieve by RTO. While unpopular decisions are inevitable, he says that employees are much more likely to be accepting of them if there is transparency and data to back them up.

And, if something isn’t working, there needs to be flexibility to follow that learning curve. “I think there are enough companies out there that are going to land where hybrid or remote only is what they want to try and they want to make work,” he says. “Because they realize it’s better for their employees.”

When it comes to finding the balance between RTO and employee mental health, Wolfe suggests casting a wide net and setting policies that will work for the majority of employees. Exceptions can then be made on a case-by-case basis.

Leadership isn’t alone in wading through 2025’s competing workplace trends. Employees will have to cope as well. For them, Wolfe suggests asking for clarification to help understand the reasoning behind these decisions.

“I think they should be vocal about it, vocal in a respectful way,” he says. “I think they should ask questions. They should point out to their leader… or whoever is having this conversation or relaying this information, that these seem counterintuitive.”

As they ask questions, employees should also make it a point to try and understand the results that companies are aiming for through such policy changes. By doing so, they may be able to suggest other ways that those goals could be reached without a full RTO.

Sharing concerns and solutions could therefore be helpful to leaders who are often sheltered from employee perspectives, Wolfe explains. “A lot of times when employees would bring things to me in my past lives, it was something I didn’t even know about. And so they’re, to me, the best source of information. They see the day-to-day.”

Photo from prostock-studio/Shutterstock.com

Polcastro is an author, photographer and adventurer based out of Baja California Sur, México. She enjoys writing just about anything, from gritty fiction to business and environmental issues. One day she hopes to travel the world with nothing but her dogs and a backpack.

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