Matti Vartiainen

Purpose: This study explores how first-line managers adapt relationship management practices during the transition from onsite to remote and hybrid work amid prolonged uncertainty. Design/methodology/approach: A longitudinal case study using temporal bracketing analyzed 49 interviews with seven first-line managers over one year during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings: Managers initially compensated for reduced physical proximity and social cues through sensing and visibility practices. As remote work persisted, these practices became routinized and distributed through team relationships. With the transition to hybrid work, managers selectively integrated physical and virtual interaction based on the relational information each provided. Across these phases, managers progressively reconstructed social awareness. Practical implications: Managers can support relationship management in hybrid work by deliberately creating opportunities for social awareness across physical and virtual interactions. Organizations can facilitate this through interaction structures, peer-learning opportunities and training to help managers recognize and respond to relational cues across distributed teams. Originality/value: This study conceptualizes relationship management as a dynamic process that evolves through compensation, routinization, distribution and selective integration as managers’ access to physical proximity and social cues changes.

Introduction: This article reviews the discussion concerning hybrid work (HW) during and after the pandemic. We argue that understanding hybrid work as simply dividing working time between an office and another location limits the potential of organizing work sustainably based on organizations' goals and employee needs. Understanding the core nature of hybridity as a flexible and systemic entity and a “combination of two or more things” impacting work outcomes such as wellbeing and performance opens a much richer view of organizing work now and in the future. The critical questions are: What is the core nature of hybridity when two or more things are combined in work, and what factors influence configuring them? Moreover, what are their potential wellbeing and performance outcomes?Methods: To discover core elements, we reviewed how the HW concept was defined in consulting companies' publications, business journals, and international organizations' publications, mainly focusing on challenges and opportunities for hybrid work during COVID-19. We also analyzed how the concept was used in European questionnaire findings from 27 EU countries during the pandemic. The potential wellbeing and performance outcomes were studied using a sample of prior literature reviews on remote and telework. To identify “Two or more things” in the discussions, we broke down the HW concepts into the physical, virtual, social, and temporal work elements and their sub-elements and designable features.Results: We found that the concepts used in the discussions on hybrid work reflect traditional views of remote and telework as a combination of working at home and in the office.Discussion: We suggest configuring hybrid work as a flexible entity, which opens a perspective to design and implement diverse types of hybrid work that are much more prosperous and sustainable than just combining onsite and offsite work. The expected wellbeing and performance outcomes can be controversial due to the misfit of the hybrid work elements with the organizational purpose, employee needs and expectations, and non-observed contextual factors in implementations.

"Flexible Hybrid Work" published on 16 May 2024 by Edward Elgar Publishing.

Despite hybrid work becoming increasingly relevant since the COVID-19 pandemic, exactly what the phenomenon entails remains a burgeoning field of research. Matti Vartiainen explores this shift in working culture and what it means for staff wellbeing and performance, as well as how remote work policies can be implemented effectively.

Hybrid work (HW) is a flexible, timewise combination of physical, virtual, and social elements for working anywhere (WFA). It is based on the flexibility paradigm. In addition to multiple physical locations and workplaces, time autonomy and digital technologies are used flexibly in HW based on agreeing employees' and organisations' timely and context-based needs. As the working context, the configuration of these basic elements sets demands and interacts with an individual’s mind or mental space. The sustainable use of these elements as job demands requires their development as physical, virtual, social, and personal resources compatible with demands. The human mind utilises the mental space consisting of cognitive and affective sub-elements. HW benefits from the flexible use of workplaces and rearrangements in communication and social relations, including digital collaboration platforms. The quality of outcomes is shown as the states of well-being and performance. The book describes the elements of hybrid work as the designable bases of flexible organising. HW is based on remote work and telework tradition and experiences gained in the work-from-home (WFH) during the pandemic. The book shows hybrid work's demands, potential resources, and human, social, and performance outcomes based on empirical studies. In addition to designable features, critical factors impacting the implementation and adaptation of HW are also shown. Superiors, as well as employees, need to update their competencies. Finally, the future of hybrid work is sketched.

Recent global studies show that among employees, hybrid work is the expected and desired arrangement for the future, also many employers consider it as an opportunity. This chapter concerns the potential benefits hybrid work can have for employees and organisations and what opportunities there could be to realise benefits. While hindrances as job features are something to get rid of and challenges to develop in organisations, the benefits of hybrid work are features of work that could be pursued when planning and implementing hybrid work. Benefits motivate actions, and using them provides opportunities to succeed in the transformation toward sustainable hybrid work. Sustainability means a balanced consideration of job well-being and smooth work activities. Benefits are first examined by looking at the traditional remote work and telework literature, and then how they appeared in studies made during the pandemic in mandatory remote work from home. Finally, expectations related to the benefits of hybrid work in the European survey during the pandemic for the future and the opportunities to realise them are reported. In the end, benefits and opportunities are discussed as the features to observe when designing and implementing hybrid work.

This chapter discusses how to achieve the expected benefits when implementing hybrid work. The critical factors in designing, implementing, adjusting, and crafting hybrid work are shown. The chapter begins by presenting some implementation basics. The primary factors framing the implementation of hybrid work are the purpose and goal of an organisation, the needs of employees, work content to be hybridised, work demands to be paid attention to, available resources to realise the implementation, and the implementation process itself. The transformation should serve the needs of employees and the goals of organisations. Implementation of hybrid work solutions is first explored based on empirical findings of traditional remote and telework studies; they provide good practices to use also for hybrid work. In addition, experiences with the first hybrid work implementation initiatives in European organisations during the pandemic are shown. The first cases took place in 2021 during the second wave of the pandemic; these findings are discussed by reflecting on prior literature. Finally, some key practices will be highlighted that will help the change succeed.

The management of the organisations has expectations and aims concerning flexible work arrangements. They are usually concerned with confirming the preconditions of fluent operations for productivity and often also engagement and well-being of the personnel. In practice, this requires providing suitable physical premises and working conditions for employees, tools and technologies for communication and collaboration, and fostering human resources such as competencies of both employees and their superiors. Senior management, middle managers and supervisors have a special role in hybrid work, as they often must carry out their profession from afar, assign and share tasks and responsibilities to employees, and enable their self-leadership skills and practices. This chapter shows what kinds of challenges and opportunities superiors are expected to meet in hybrid work and how they are tackled. First, management goals and expectations are presented, and then the leadership roles and experiences in traditional remote and telework. After that, leadership experiences during the pandemic are shown when the superiors themselves became remote workers. Finally, leadership tasks and roles shared among management, superiors, and hybrid employees are discussed.

The preliminary hybrid work model is used to analyse the discussion on hybrid work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Two types of material sources were collected and analysed. First, the material was collected from the publications of consulting companies, business journals and international organisations, and, secondly, from 27 EU-country correspondents. In the publications, the physical space elements - working remotely and in the office - and the temporal elements were the most frequently used to characterise hybrid work. In the country reports, physical space and time were the most common basic elements defining hybrid work. In addition, social space, virtual space, and their sub-elements were sometimes used. In the end, the views are synthesised and presented as an extended hybrid work model.