How To Handle Return-To-Work Anxiety Among Your Employees

Three tips for HR leaders

Whether you’re reading the news or catching up with colleagues, there’s one phrase dominating the Covid-19 conversation: return to work. These words carry so much meaning for workers, employers and HR leaders alike, stirring up dread, excitement and everything in-between. 

But as HR teams build out their return policies, the burdens of the past year simply cannot be ignored. There’s a new force to be reckoned with when it comes to worker sentiment: rampant anxiety about returning to physical spaces. Combined with the CDC’s recent recommendations to loosen mask requirements, returning to work in this new stage of the pandemic is a recipe for internal turmoil. 
 

And this anxiety is not unfounded. Vaccine rollouts can only do so much to heal a year’s worth of turbulent change and unexpected loss - unvaccinated coworkers, virus variants and pulling back on mask and social distancing requirements can stir up emotions in your workforce, especially when combined with environmental change following a year at home. 

As complicated as alleviating anxiety may be, business leaders owe their nervous employees the reassurance they need to return to work with confidence. Doing so not only builds trust among team members but ensures a smoother transition for all.

In my experience, working with organizations strategizing safe returns to physical spaces, I’ve helped leaders at schools, offices, research facilities, resorts, film sets and more welcome employees back for an array of work.

Here are my tips on keeping your workers safe, confident and anxiety-free during a workspace change: 
 

• Demonstrate a complete understanding of local, state and federal health guidelines. A year of fluctuating health and safety news has left workers weary of change. Don’t wait for your employees to ask about your latest plans to implement safety initiatives - proactively communicate that you’re up to date on the latest Covid-19 news and recommended health and safety protocols as it relates to returning to the office. We all know that everything can change quickly, so establishing your HR team as knowledgeable and proactive in the infectious disease management space will instill trust in your ability to guide the workforce back to the office.  With the right communication from HR, anxious employees can begin to view their leadership team as a force of stability in an often chaotic landscape. 

 

• Invest in stopping outbreaks before they happen, but plan for any scenario. As we learn more about Covid-19, experts are predicting that it will reach endemic status like the seasonal flu, only heightening anxieties for already nervous workers. As people return to congregate settings like offices, HR leaders need to face the reality head-on that transmission is not out of the question. But there are ways to limit the possibility of workplace breakouts: symptom screening, pooled surveillance testing and remaining aware of who’s received a vaccine (and later down the road, booster shots) can all significantly reduce the likelihood that your team will be exposed to Covid-19 at work. In case of a breakout, contact tracing plans should be implemented as well to coordinate quarantines. With these safeguards in place, anxious workers will know that their employers are taking every step necessary to stop breakouts before they happen.

 

• Validate the concerns of your teammates. It’s impossible to know what your workforce has experienced in the past year. With over 580,000 Covid-19 related deaths in the United States alone, countless Americans have lost loved ones in the past year, and even more, have likely witnessed close calls with the disease. This loss, combined with a looming quarantine-induced mental health crisis, means that returning to work is far more complicated than meets the eye. Check-in with your employees leading up to the in-person transition, and as returning to work becomes a reality, continue to gauge worker sentiment routinely to paint a picture of how your team feels about the change. A clear demonstration of emotional understanding in the context of the pandemic can instill trust between employers and employees, increasing the likelihood that in-person work will be successful long-term. 

As excited as employers may be to get their teams back into physical spaces, leaders must accept that like everything else in the past year, work culture and employee sentiment have changed dramatically. Return to work anxiety will not go away overnight, but its role in the future of your organization cannot be ignored. The more that HR leaders do to embrace the realities of the next stage of the pandemic, the more workers can comfortably return to in-person work, anxiety-free. 

Jikku Venkat is the Co-Founder & CEO at ReturnSafe. For the past 20 years, Dr. Venkat has been involved with startup companies in healthcare technology, enterprise software, cloud SaaS, and virtualization. Dr. Venkat was Co-Founder and Product Management Lead at Kinvey, an industry recognized market leader in cloud-based application development platforms. He has built successful Engineering, Product Management, and Customer Services organizations from the ground up at Draker Energy, Virtual Bridges, and United Devices. As Co-Founder and CTO at United Devices, he pioneered the concept of Grid computing for supercomputing and business applications, a precursor to the IaaS products of today. Visit https://returnsafe.com/  Connect Jikku Venkat