New research from Portland, Oregon-based insurer The Standard reveals that the biggest obstacles to returning to work after a leave are shared across the entire workforce, cutting across gender and generation in ways that HR leaders are not fully accounting for. The finding puts pressure on employers who have built return-to-work support strategies around demographic assumptions, only to discover those assumptions may be leaving significant gaps.
The study, The Post-Absence Experience Is in the Eye of the Beholder, draws on parallel surveys of 509 HR decision-makers and 501 employees conducted by two third-party research firms in early 2026. The Standard, which provides group disability and absence management products, commissioned the research.
Stress and fatigue ranked as the top self-reported challenge for employees returning from leave, cited by 43% of women and 39% of men. Work-life balance followed closely at 40% and 35%, respectively. The numbers reveal relatively little distance between women and men, yet HR professionals consistently paint a wider gap. On stress and fatigue specifically, HR placed 36% of women and 10% of men as struggling, a spread more than three times wider than employees themselves report.
The pattern holds across caregiving, stigma, work schedules, and productivity. HR leaders are significantly more likely than employees to frame return-to-work difficulties as concentrated among women and younger workers, particularly Gen Z and millennials. On work-life balance, HR estimated that 58% of millennials struggle after returning from leave. Employees in that cohort put the figure at 20%.
When advisors help employer clients design return-to-work support, the starting point is typically what HR believes about its workforce. That holds whether the work involves structuring short-term disability programs, recommending employee assistance programs, or evaluating leave management platforms. If those beliefs are systematically skewed toward certain demographic groups, resources get aimed at the wrong populations, and the employees who most need support go unserved.
Dottie Tieslau, assistant vice president of policyholder services at The Standard, pointed to the downstream effects. “Employers invest significant time and resources in supporting employees while they’re on leave,” she said. “But what happens after they return is just as important. Understanding how employees experience the transition back to work can help organizations create a stronger and more supportive return-to-work experience.”
Of all the return-to-work challenges the study examined, reintegration is where the usual pattern inverts. Everywhere else, HR overstates the difficulty relative to what employees report. On reintegration, employees identify more struggle than HR perceives for both men and women, and across all generations. While HR estimated that 44% of women face reintegration difficulties, employees put that figure at 50%. For men, 21% of employees identified reintegration as a challenge, compared with just 6% of HR decision-makers.
Both groups also largely agree on the generational distribution, seeing reintegration as a problem spread relatively evenly from Gen Z to boomers. The alignment is notable precisely because it is unusual. It suggests that reintegration is the return-to-work challenge least shaped by demographic assumption and most reflective of a structural gap in how employers support employees after leave.
Only 32% of employers in the study said they offer a return-to-work employee resource group, making it one of the least common ERG types. The Standard notes that existing ERGs focused on adjacent areas - mental health, caregiving, parenting, or disability - represent an underused channel for directing employees to benefits and support they may not know they have access to. The same employers who say reintegration is hard are, in many cases, sitting on tools they have not deployed.
Employers expanding leave offerings without building corresponding administrative and support infrastructure face a compounding risk. Leave programs that employees cannot navigate, or that do not carry through to reintegration support, create the conditions where workers disengage or quietly exit rather than seek support.
The Standard’s research also examined what happens after the return date itself. Both HR leaders and employees described reintegration as a process that continues well beyond day one, involving the gradual rebuilding of routines, responsibilities, and workplace confidence. For employees still managing stress or fatigue from the leave period, that transition can stretch over weeks.
A separate June 2026 Standard study, Mental Health in the Workplace: Will Gen Z Men Shrink the Stigma?, found that Gen Z men are 35% less likely than women in their cohort to return to work after a mental health leave. That figure illustrates how reintegration failures translate directly into retention losses. Employers whose return-to-work strategies stop at the return date are, in effect, creating a window where disengaged employees drift toward exit without triggering any formal support response.
The case for treating reintegration as an ongoing process, rather than a single event, is embedded in the benefits package itself. Phased return arrangements, manager check-ins structured around employee needs, post-leave surveys, and mental health resources that remain accessible after the return date all sit within the scope of what a well-designed benefits program can provide. The question the data raises is how many employers have connected those pieces into a coherent whole, and whether the advisors guiding their benefits decisions have identified the gap.
