For many office workers over the past 16 months, the lines between work and home have blurred. Work has seeped into our personal space and time.
“The boundaries are completely gone,” says Liz Hilton Segel, managing partner of North America at McKinsey, at Fortune’s Global Forum
According to research done by her firm, 44% of office workers have negative feelings about returning to the office. Those numbers, she said, were even higher among certain subpopulations: people with children, millennials, and Black Americans.
Bringing people back to the office will require a focus on inclusion, she suggested—and that managers question employees about how their mental health can be bettered. According to Hilton Segel, managers should be asking: “Is there something foundational that is holding you back from being able to work most productively, and how are you tackling that?”
According to a rough poll of forum attendees conducted by Fortune, the most important thing they thought could be done to improve mental health in the workplace is allowing more flexible working hours and hybrid work models.
“Hopefully one of the positive sides of this COVID-19 moment is that the mental model from before, which was, ‘My personal life lived behind a curtain, and I didn’t discuss it and I didn’t even acknowledge that it existed,’ is a thing of the past,” says Hilton Segel.