Connection lost: the cost of working apart – an employer’s guide to hybrid working and mental health

Workplace culture has come a very long way since 2002. For those of us who remember turn-of-the-century offices, it was suits and ties with paper printouts, it was pre-smartphone, pre-broadband, pre-video call, and it was even before workplace smoking was banned. For many modern workers, those are offices that would be completely unrecognisable.

But it was also 2002 when, as a legal framework, flexible working was first introduced. For the first time, eligible employees were allowed to request changes to hours, times, and location of work. In 2014, that right was widened to all employees with the required service, which made flexible arrangements much more mainstream – in principle.

Hybrid working as we know it today wasn’t actually adopted at scale until 2020, after the first COVID lockdowns forced mass homeworking. What began in 2002 as a policy to, among other things, improve the mental health of workers by giving them greater flexibility – has generated an array of unexpected outcomes as the reality of hybrid working played out in less than ideal circumstances.

Today, it remains a divisive topic:

• Owners ask “why am I paying high lease rates for half-empty offices?”
• Leaders ask “how can I effectively manage, train, and oversee workers who I barely see in-person?”
• Workers ask “why do I need to be in the office when COVID proved we can do our jobs from home?”

There are good reasons for these contentions. 89% of respondents to our Future Workspaces survey say they have access to hybrid or flexible working, and 93% say that wellbeing benefits have increased over the past three years. 77% also prioritise work-life balance above almost everything else. On paper, the modern workplace has never been more attuned to the needs of its people.

But satisfaction with coworker interactions is falling year-on-year – from 36% to 29%.

82% say they value a sense of community at work, yet fewer report finding it. And when asked what single benefit they would most like to improve, the top answer – from people who already have flexible working – was more flexible working.

This article explores what’s gone wrong, who’s responsible, and what employers can do – practically and legally – to address the mental health consequences of a working model that, for all its benefits, has introduced risks that many organisations are still not equipped to manage.

Did we care more when things were worse?

The early months of the pandemic produced, paradoxically, some of the strongest workplace cultures many organisations had ever experienced. Colleagues checked in on one another and managers made welfare calls. There was a collective understanding that things were difficult, and an unspoken agreement to look out for each other.

That solidarity has not survived the transition to business-as-usual hybrid. Speaking at our Future Workspaces Conference, David Bellamy – founder of workplace analytics platform Harkn – was direct about what has been lost: warmth, humour, and spontaneous human connection have been gradually engineered out of the working day. Virtual meetings are transactional. They’re back-to-back. The informal check-in has been replaced by a calendar invite, with a hard stop.

Maris Hanson, Group Chief Legal and People Officer at Giant Group, described a related consequence. In a hybrid environment, a mistake can come to define a person – because the informal interactions that would normally provide context, nuance, and the opportunity to recover are no longer there. The corridor conversation, the shared lunch, the quiet word after a difficult meeting – these are moments that served as connective tissue. Without them, professional relationships became more brittle, and the margin for error narrowed.

In an office environment, you naturally observe. You notice when someone’s demeanour changes, when their energy drops, when they’re ready for a new challenge. On a screen, those signals are much harder to detect.

Open doors don’t mean open minds

There is a tempting narrative that mental health in the workplace has been destigmatised.

It’s true that awareness campaigns are widespread, that Mental Health First Aiders are commonplace, and that wellbeing is a standing item on many boardroom agendas. But awareness and action are not the same thing. David Bellamy shared an observation at our conference that should give every employer pause: employees will not talk to their employers about their mental health until they are in crisis.

In David’s business, Harkn, data collected on employee sentiment revealed identifiable patterns that could predict – six weeks in advance – when an individual would reach out for help.

But disclosure is also only half of the problem. Most organisations, David said, are still not addressing something more fundamental – providing employees with the space and freedom to talk openly about the personal side of their work. Many workplaces have lost the conditions in which honest conversation can happen at all. Policies may invite openness, but the architecture of the modern working day – back-to-back calls, transactional meetings, no margin for the unscripted – has closed the open doors that used to be there.

A generation that can’t go home

Much of the discourse around hybrid working assumes that working from home is universally available. It isn’t – and the gap disproportionately affects the people who can least afford it.

Nyssa Higgins, Head of HR at Fasthosts, raised a point at our conference that is often overlooked in policy discussions. 60% of her younger call centre workers are unable to work from home effectively on a daily basis. House shares, student accommodation, and overcrowded households are not conducive to focused professional work. For these employees – typically younger, more junior, and earlier in their careers – the “flexibility” of hybrid working is a benefit they cannot fully access.

Maris Hanson made the case that organic learning – like overhearing a colleague handle an objection, watching someone navigate a difficult conversation, absorbing the behaviours and rhythms of experienced professionals – simply does not happen on video calls. These informal learning moments, which previous generations took for granted, are severed in remote-first environments.

Junior employees who cannot work from home effectively are therefore also the ones who most need to be physically present alongside others to develop. They miss out on social capital, informal mentoring, and cultural absorption. And when professional development stalls, the mental health consequences – frustration, isolation, a sense of being left behind – tend to follow.

The question of responsibility

When our conference panellists were asked who bears responsibility for employee mental health – HR, management, or the individual – the responses were instructive.

Nyssa Higgins was direct. Too many line managers assume that mental health is an HR function. It isn’t. HR can provide frameworks, tools, and policies – but it is not HR who sits alongside employees day to day. Line managers are best placed to notice changes, ask meaningful questions, and intervene early. But they need the training and confidence to do so. Not simply asking “are you okay?” – which invites a reflexive “I’m fine” – but having the skill to say “I’ve noticed something has changed. Can we talk about it?”

Maris Hanson directed attention upwards. Senior leadership teams are responsible for setting the tone and for ensuring that messaging around wellbeing is consistent and credible. If the executive team says mental health matters but then schedules wall-to-wall meetings without breaks, it’s a very hollow message.
David Bellamy framed it in structural terms. Leadership is responsible for the conditions in which people work. Burnout does not happen in a vacuum – it happens in professional environments where the conditions permit it. And those conditions are determined from the top.

But in an era where leaders are encouraged to be vulnerable and open about their own struggles, there is a point at which this can undermine rather than build confidence. Not every leader is well-served by sharing their personal mental health journey publicly – and employees don’t always respond to vulnerability with trust. Sometimes what people need from leadership is not performed empathy, but demonstrated stability.

A broken contract

Beneath the practical challenges of hybrid working lies something more fundamental – a deterioration in the relationship between employer and employee – that predates the pandemic, but has been accelerated by it.

The social contract that once governed work was relatively simple:

Attend > perform > be loyal > progress.

There was an implicit bargain, commitment in exchange for a career. For most workers today, it’s a bargain that no longer holds. Career paths are far from guaranteed and restructures are increasingly routine. Redundancy programmes are framed as efficiency exercises. Employers have demonstrated, repeatedly, that headcount is a variable to be managed – rather than a relationship to be honoured.

David Bellamy articulated the consequence of this at our conference with a question that deserves serious consideration: if an employer is willing to make your role redundant next quarter, why would you commute two hours to sit in their office today?

When companies sold off their sports clubs, closed their subsidised canteens, stripped away the social infrastructure that once made the workplace a community – they may not have intended to send a message, but they did. And now, as organisations struggle to bring people back with the enthusiasm and commitment they once had, the reasons for resistance aren’t complex.

This is relevant to mental health because the perception of job security – or the lack of it – is one of the strongest predictors of workplace stress. When employees feel disposable, their engagement declines, their anxiety increases, and their willingness to invest emotionally in their work diminishes.

Should Big Brother be watching?

A question from the floor at our conference cut to the heart of something underlying most of these matters:

“How do we monitor productivity at home without being Orwellian?”

It is a tough question. Employers have a reasonable interest in understanding whether work is being done effectively, and the loss of physical visibility in hybrid models creates an information gap that can be uncomfortable – particularly for organisations without strong cultures of trust.

Maris Hanson’s view was that trust must be the starting point. People do not, by default, want to do the wrong thing. If an organisation builds trust, encourages openness, and creates a culture where mistakes can be acknowledged without fear – the need for surveillance diminishes. But this requires clear expectations from leadership about what is expected and how flexibility is to be used.

For organisations where that culture does not yet exist, the temptation to fill the gap with technology – keystroke logging, screen monitoring, activity tracking – is real. But the evidence suggests that surveillance tools do more harm than good to the very thing they are trying to protect: productivity. Employees who feel monitored tend to report higher levels of anxiety, lower levels of trust, and reduced engagement. The tool designed to ensure performance may be the thing that undermines it.

How to move forward

Design connection into the model, rather than mandating presence.

Requiring full-time office attendance is unlikely to succeed and may provoke exactly the disengagement it seeks to prevent. Instead, identify the activities that are genuinely enhanced by physical proximity – onboarding, mentoring, collaborative problem-solving, team-building – and structure your hybrid model around those moments. Allow everything else to flex. The objective is not to fill desks, but to create reasons for people to come together that feel purposeful rather than performative.

Move from reactive wellbeing to proactive intervention.

If your organisation is only addressing mental health when an employee reaches crisis point, you are – based on the evidence – six weeks too late. Invest in the structures, both cultural and technological, that allow early identification of declining wellbeing. Train line managers to have meaningful conversations, rather than scripted check-ins. And audit whether your existing wellbeing benefits are actually being used. Low uptake isn’t evidence that your people are fine – but it could be evidence that the offering isn’t working.

Address the generational divide explicitly.

Recognise that hybrid working does not affect all employees equally. Younger and more junior workers are disproportionately disadvantaged – both in their ability to work from home and in their access to the informal learning and social capital that offices provide. Consider how your model supports early-career employees specifically, and whether you are inadvertently creating a two-tier workforce in which those with the least experience receive the least support.

Rebuild the social contract.

If you want employees to invest emotionally in their work – to be present, engaged, and resilient – you need to demonstrate that the investment is reciprocal. This means being honest about job security, transparent about organisational change, and consistent in the value you place on your people. Words alone are not sufficient. The organisations that will attract and retain the best talent will be those where employees believe, based on evidence and experience, that they matter.

Get the legal foundations in place.

Your duty of care as an employer doesn’t stop at the office threshold. If your employees are working from home – from co-working spaces, or from any other location – your obligations follow them. Review your policies, understand the current legal landscape, and seek advice that is specific to your size, sector, and operating model. The regulatory environment around flexible working, employee monitoring, and workplace wellbeing is a live, evolving movement that you have to keep up with.