Hybrid Work
Summary: Work arrangements combining office-based and home-based days, raising questions about self-regulation, social connection, and creativity that traditional office research didn’t need to address.
Sources: raw/Daily_use_of_self-leadership_strategies_and_employ.pdf; raw/patterer-et-al-2026-working-alone-but-together-the-relationship-between-social-support-and-radical-and-incremental.pdf
Last updated: 2026-05-10
The share of employees in fully or predominantly remote work reached 28% globally by 2023 and continues to rise (Patterer et al., 2024). Hybrid arrangements — typically one to three days per week at home — are the most common form. This creates a fragmented work environment where social and structural conditions differ day-to-day.
What changes across locations
The home office removes resources (structure, visibility, social validation, supervised routine) and some demands (commuting, open-plan distraction, social performance). The net effect on engagement and creativity depends on what the worker substitutes for absent resources.
Key shift: when supervisors and colleagues disappear, employees must self-lead. Research shows that workers who apply self-goal setting, self-reward, and visualization on home days achieve higher engagement. The strategies compensate for absent environmental scaffolding, not for absent motivation. See self-leadership and patterer-self-leadership-remote-work.
The coworking response to isolation
Remote workers who struggle with isolation increasingly use coworking spaces — shared offices for freelancers and remote employees from different organisations. Coworking provides social presence without formal interdependence. Social support in these spaces predicts radical creativity directly, and incremental creativity for workers who are sufficiently embedded in the community. See patterer-coworking-creativity.
JD-R model
Both Patterer papers and han-workplace-digitization apply the Job Demands-Resources framework: work context shapes demands and resources, which propagate through to engagement and output. The framework predicts that work location effects are mediated — not direct — which is why location alone is an unreliable predictor of performance.