Making Flex Fair: Hybrid Work, Wellbeing, and Good Work Design

Is hybrid work always ‘good’ work? The ability to have a flexible mix of office-based and remote working tends to be seen as synonymous with flexibility, yet the research presented here surfaces a more complex picture, one where hybrid arrangements remain embedded in organisational systems that continue to privilege certain ways of working.

Across surveys and interviews with UK workers, their research surfaces how hybrid working can lead to:

• Intensification, with work getting faster and more dense through more meetings, more messages, more task-switching, tighter deadlines and fewer natural breaks

• Extensification, with work spreading temporally - into evenings and weekends, but also spatially – into kitchens, bedrooms, and other non-traditional spaces.

This leads to increases in ‘work-life conflict’, with significant impacts on wellbeing.

Importantly, these impacts are not felt equally, and vary according to gender, seniority, caring responsibility and socio-economic resource.

As Sir Charlie Mayfield’s Keep Britain Working review emphasises, this really matters as poor health and wellbeing are significant drivers of economic inactivity in the UK.

But findings point to policy changes and organisational best practice that can really Make Flex Fair.

“Making flex fair makes an important contribution to the debate around hybrid work, providing much-needed research rigour where evidence has previously been lacking. But it does more than that, showing how successful introduction of hybrid working is about placing it in the context of organisational design and HR practices. We know that hybrid working is emancipatory for some workers; what this study highlights is how many others are caught in ‘always on’ connectivity, and suffering genuine wellbeing harms from cycles of intensification and extensification - and how good work design can help prevent them.”

Jonathan Morris, Emeritus Professor specialising in organisational management, Cardiff University

“This report makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates about the changing nature of hybrid work. Drawing on a compelling evidence base, it demonstrates how the benefits of hybrid work are shaped by work design, managerial practice and workers’ diverse circumstances. The research offers a progressive agenda for creating forms of flexibility that are both sustainable and genuinely inclusive.”

Professor Kirsty Newsome, Chair in Employment Relations, Centre for Decent Work, Sheffield University Management School

Watch the launch webinar recording here: