The hidden wellbeing cost of flexible work

Flexible work is here to stay, and so are the demands placed on your people. The office once provided much of the structure that supported health by default. In a hybrid world, that structure must be designed deliberately, and increasingly, that responsibility sits with HR, writes Jessica Spendlove.

Victoria is making working from home a legal right, with the Equal Opportunity Amendment (Work from Home) Bill 2026 giving eligible employees a statutory right to work from home two days per week. Notwithstanding the recent announcement that Premier Ben Carroll is delaying the implementation of the laws by 10 months, NSW has, on the other hand, spent two years directing public servants back to the office. Two states, two opposite directions, yet both sides have largely overlooked one question: what does flexible work actually do to people’s health?

I have spent 15 years at the intersection of wellbeing and high performance, working across elite sport, special forces, and corporate leadership teams. Here is what I have watched play out since hybrid work became the norm: flexibility without structure erodes over time, health, performance and productivity.

The office was a health intervention nobody designed

Before hybrid work, much of what protected your people’s health happened automatically. The commute created a transition between work and home. Lunch away from the desk was a recovery pause. Walking between meetings was incidental movement. A conversation at the coffee machine was connection. None of it was designed, but together these small behaviours supported health, performance, and productivity.

When the office stopped being the default, those supports disappeared and most people never built replacements. Meals become inconsistent, incidental movement declined, the boundary between work and recovery blurred, and the opportunity for connection reduced. Australian research found employees working from home or in hybrid arrangements reported more loneliness, depression, and anxiety than colleagues working primarily in the office.

None of this is an argument against flexible work, which offers substantial benefits, including greater autonomy, reduced commuting time, and, for some individuals, improvements in sleep and lifestyle behaviours. It is a reminder that when we changed where work happened, we also changed many of the behaviours that quietly supported health, without deliberately replacing them. Importantly, the impact of flexible work is not uniform; outcomes depend heavily on individual circumstances, role design, and the quality of organisational systems.

The conversation around flexible work has rightly focused on the physical infrastructure needed to do the job: laptops, monitors, ergonomic workstations and secure technology. The next opportunity is to give equal attention to the health infrastructure that supports movement, recovery, transitions, and connection. This includes how the workday is structured, how breaks are normalised, and how social interaction is facilitated. These factors directly influence wellbeing, capacity, and sustained performance.

For HR leaders, this extends beyond the wellbeing dashboard. Psychosocial risk obligations require organisations to proactively manage the conditions that affect psychological health. A flexible work policy that increases autonomy while unintentionally removing the structures that support health deserves the same attention as any other workplace health risk.

The next evolution of flexible work

If the challenge is structural, part of the solution needs to be structural. Treat the flexible work policy itself as a health lever. Set norms around start and finish times so the workday has clear edges. Protect breaks between blocks of meetings. Encourage a manufactured commute, a 10-minute walk that formally ends the working day and gives the body the transition it lost. Normalise movement, lunch away from the screen, and a deliberate end to the workday. Few organisations are approaching flexible work this deliberately yet. That is the opportunity.

Most importantly, leaders need to model it and walk the talk. The WorkWell Leaders Impact Measure found that leader wellbeing is the single most powerful driver of organisational wellbeing, which in turn is the strongest predictor of business performance. Yet the same study found only one in six C-suites takes primary responsibility for wellbeing, so the gap between talking and walking is real. A manager who sends emails at 10pm and skips lunch sets the real policy, regardless of what the document says. A leader who visibly finishes work, takes breaks, moves during the day and protects recovery gives their team permission to do the same. If you want to improve workforce health in a hybrid environment, start with how your leaders work, because that is the standard everyone else calibrates to.

Flexible work is here to stay, and so are the demands placed on your people. The office once provided much of the structure that supported health by default. In a hybrid world, that structure must be designed deliberately, and increasingly, that responsibility sits with HR. The hidden cost of flexible work comes from assuming health takes care of itself once the structure disappears. The organisations that thrive will be the ones that intentionally build health into the way work is designed, and they will see the return not only in their people, but in their performance and productivity.

Jessica Spendlove is a performance dietitian, wellbeing and high-performance keynote speaker and author of “For the Long Run: Build your daily operating system for energy, recovery and wellbeing”.

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