HR should be mindful of employee mental health during an RTO

Before mandating an RTO, check on your employees’ mental health.

Nearly one-fourth (23%) of US employees are depressed, according to the American Psychiatric Association Foundation. Due to depression and anxiety, roughly 12 billion workdays are lost annually—that translates to $1 trillion, the World Health Organization reported.

As companies increasingly move remote and hybrid employees into offices full-time, HR pros should be mindful of the “hardships” they may experience, said Betsy Schwartz, senior director for the Center for Workplace Mental Health at the American Psychiatric Association Foundation. The center recently published resources to help employers transition their employees to in-person work.

Employees’ mental health may suffer when adjusting to a five-day RTO, especially if they’re contending with caregiving needs and commuting costs, Schwartz told HR Brew.

To ease the transition, she said HR can remind employees about existing mental health resources, or offer new ones. The Center for Workplace Mental Health, she added, offers a short, online training course that teaches employees and managers to identify and talk about mental health issues in the workplace, and find resources to help.

“We all have great intentions. We all want to be helpful, but it’s not common sense always to know exactly what to notice and how to engage someone in the conversation,” she said.

Another strategy that can be helpful, Schwartz said, is encouraging employees to use PTO as a means of gradually easing into a full-time, in-person workweek. She said she’s seen managers encourage employees in the first few weeks of an RTO to take weekly vacation days, so they’re not coming back five days, but three or four, and then five.

“Employees can feel uncertain just because it is a time of change, so it’s really important for HR managers to be clear about what resources are available in the company and what the policies are,” she said.