Ashlee Shoup had been craving a better balance between her work and her life. And for six months, she actually got it.

The 25-year-old in Virginia Beach, Va., switched from an in-person job as a manager for a financial-services company to a remote role with a life-insurance firm in January 2021, taking a $20,000 pay cut for the privilege of flexibility. Instead of a two-hour long commute to drop off her infant son with family before heading to work, she went on a morning walk with him. Instead of scrolling her phone during...

Ashlee Shoup had been craving a better balance between her work and her life. And for six months, she actually got it.

The 25-year-old in Virginia Beach, Va., switched from an in-person job as a manager for a financial-services company to a remote role with a life-insurance firm in January 2021, taking a $20,000 pay cut for the privilege of flexibility. Instead of a two-hour long commute to drop off her infant son with family before heading to work, she went on a morning walk with him. Instead of scrolling her phone during her lunch break, she prepped dinner. She felt relieved, efficient at everything, as if she finally had a life outside of work.

Then her company announced everyone would have to come back to the office three times a week.

“It was a complete dread,” she says. “A panic of, ‘oh my God, this is really happening.’ ”

Many return-to-work dates that were once stuck in limbo are now being added back to the calendar. Some workers are excited to be returning to pre-pandemic normalcy. For others, it feels like a loss. After coping with the panic and upheaval of the spring of 2020, enduring months of virtual school and health worries, they finally saw the payoff this fall: the autonomy to work how they wanted, while many other parts of life finally calmed.

Now that balance feels like it’s being taken away, says Stephanie Harris, a life and career coach who splits her time between Pompano Beach, Fla., and the Washington, D.C., area.

“I don’t want to give up this freedom I now have to do my life the way I want to do it,” she says workers are telling her, as they face pressure to revert to the way things were.

Some will quit, as Ms. Shoup did in July, rather than return to the office. (She’s focusing on her side photography business.) Others are heading back begrudgingly and with some anxiety as Covid-19 cases rise in some areas and the new Omicron strain of the virus adds an extra layer of uncertainty. They’re wrestling with cascading questions about what their time at home meant and wondering how to keep that fleeting harmony of work and family without jeopardizing their paychecks.

“I was unhappy,” Jennifer Gravel,

a director at New York City’s Department of City Planning, says of her life as a working parent before Covid-19. Her thought when called back full-time to the office in September: “Do I have to be unhappy still?”

Now 45 years old, Ms. Gravel says she spent years overwhelmed and stressed by her full-time job and caring for her two daughters. Remote work, something she never thought would be logistically feasible in her role as a manager, made her feel like she could finally do both well, and without the constant guilt of falling short at one or the other. Now that she’s back in the office, things that didn’t bother her before, like her 30-minute commute, seem cumbersome and pointless.

“It just feels like a burden,” says Ms. Gravel, who recently reduced her hours to part-time to free up time for family. “It just doesn’t have to be this way.”

She’s opting to take a leave of absence in 2022.

Conflict between work and life isn’t new, of course—or, I suspect, entirely avoidable. The difference, employees tell me, is that they now know another approach is possible.

“Anything you take away from someone is going to create angst,” says Kate Lister, the president of Global Workplace Analytics, which consults with companies on flexible work setups. Employees of her corporate clients are pushing back against return-to-office mandates, she says.

Many executives, meanwhile, are feeling impatient to get workers back where they can see them, at least for a portion of the week, she says. Their sentiment is: We just cannot offer them more days at home. For now.

“The conversations I’m hearing behind the scenes are, ‘Let’s just try this. We may want to go further’ ” in offering more flexibility down the line, Ms. Lister says.

That isn’t fast enough for some. Andrew Zane left his sales job at Amazon

in October, days before the company announced it was easing its return-to-work plans. Listening to executives last spring outline their original proposal for a hybrid schedule made him feel sad, he says, and motivated him to start job-hunting. He took a full-time remote role with Salesforce and says he has no regrets.

“I’m not living two separate lives: office-corporate-sales-job Andrew and the more casual-at-home-with partner-and pets Andrew,” the 33-year-old Seattle resident says. “It just seems more harmonious.”

“Everybody’s looking for a little more harmony,” says Stew Friedman, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and founded its Work/Life Integration Project.

Of course, not everyone can score a fully remote role. Dr. Friedman promises there are still ways to inject some independence and breathing room into your workweek.

“No matter how little discretion you think you may have, you’re not in prison,” he says.

Present your manager with time-limited experiments: You’ll log off at 3 p.m. for the next four Tuesdays, for example, to volunteer at your child’s school or fit in a workout. Stress that you think it will improve your job performance since you won’t feel distracted or pulled in two different directions. And present a way to measure outcomes. Are you still hitting your project deadlines or sales quotas, or even exceeding them?

“The benefit of small wins is that you gain confidence in your ability to control your own world,” Dr. Friedman says.

Heading back to the office helps some workers better compartmentalize work and life. Erica Akpan, a communications worker in Washington, D.C., misses chatting with her co-workers and sipping Starbucks at her desk during the three days a week she used to commute.

“Work was a time to get away from being a mom,” she says. She’s a little excited for the call back to the office, which she senses might come soon.

Still, she’s hoping to negotiate an extra day each week at home. To her, that would be the perfect balance.

Write to Rachel Feintzeig at rachel.feintzeig@wsj.com