Performance, productivity, and well-being outcomes in hybrid work

Hybrid work consists of two or more basic elements of work, their sub-elements, and characteristics, which are flexibly assembled according to the organisation's purpose and the personnel's needs. Typical hybrid work arrangements include remote work, work-from-home, mobile and multi-location work, as well as virtual and digital algorithm-guided platform work. Research on hybrid work is built on a decades-long tradition of remote work.

Objectives of the study

Even before the 2020–22 pandemic, there was a debate about whether remote work is productive and its effects on well-being. A study on "mandatory" teleworking, mostly from home, during the pandemic, produced more data and research results on these effects. Following the pandemic, a debate also emerged on whether employees should return to the main workplace to ensure high-quality work performance and enhance employee well-being through social relationships. This study aims to investigate the empirical research on the effects of various forms of hybrid work on performance, productivity, and well-being outcomes.

Methods

We collected a sample of literature reviews (N=14) about traditional remote and telework outcomes. The available reviews have been conducted in many ways (Pericic and Tanveer, 2019). Three main review types are (Donthu et al., 2021, p. 287): systematic literature review, meta-analysis, and bibliometric analysis. A systematic literature review summarizes and synthesizes the findings of existing literature on a research topic or field. Meta-analysis summarizes the empirical evidence of a relationship between independent, intervening, and dependent variables while uncovering relationships that have not been studied in existing studies. Bibliometric analysis summarizes large quantities of data to present the intellectual structure and emerging trends of a research topic or field. Typically, a thorough search strategy for data involves multiple databases, articles, dissertations, conference proceedings, abstracts, and sources of grey literature. In the oldest reviews of our sample, the data was manually collected and analyzed systematically, and their contents were compared. In most systematic reviews and meta-analyses, the analysis followed the (PRISMA) guidelines (Moher et al., 2009) to ensure the quality of the review.

Our own review was done manually by selecting examples of review articles published before, during, and after the pandemic. The following items were identified in each review: the objective or research question, the analysis method, including the number of types of data, measures of telework and well-being and performance outcomes, and the findings concerning them. Our sample review articles also include information about the impacts of intervening variables as mediators or moderators, e.g., autonomy, isolation, perceived autonomy, lower work-family conflict, etc., on outcomes. However, these dependencies are not reported in this article
The research material used was empirical systematic review articles on traditional remote work and remote work done at home during the pandemic. Teleworking was used as an independent variable (e.g., intensity); the dependent variables were telework performance, productivity and well-being. The effects of background variables and intervening variables that moderate and mediate are also identified.