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

How can good work design reduce intensification and promote better hybrid work? Read the report: https://www.ifow.org/publications/mak... This suite of reports draws on research conducted for the Working@Home project led by Professor Abigail Marks, and funded by the ESRC and Newcastle University. 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. They also depend on how the ‘moral architecture’ of workplaces – what counts as ‘good’ work – is carried over uncritically into hybrid arrangements, leading to pressures to emphasise fast response times and being ‘always on’, rather than quality outputs.