Hybrid Work Collaboration

Hybrid work is claimed to be the ”new normal” and is characterized by working partly onsite and partly offsite, e.g., from home, which reduces physical proximity and increases virtuality when collaborating. Yet, hybrid work challenges some aspects of collaboration, for example, knowledge sharing, spontaneous coordination (Kirchner et al., 2022; Waizenegger et al., 2020), team performance (Lippe et al., 2019), and raises concerns about whether collective actions are in crisis (Kornberger, 2020). This PhD sets out to explore how organizations experience and manage collaboration when working hybrid, and what is needed to improve future practices.

Research approach

This study applies a longitudinal multi-case study with empirical data from interviews and surveys. Secondly, this study explores how future collaborative practices in hybrid work can be improved through experiments (Grosen & Edwards, 2023). These experiments are co-created with employees and aimed at solving challenges related to hybrid work. Through a bottom-up approach to the evaluation of experiments, these experiments will provide knowledge about how organizations can improve future hybrid work practices, and how experiments and evaluation can emphasize learning during this process.

This PhD is a part of the SPACE project, which is a collaboration between the Technical University of Denmark and HK Trade Union.

Keywords

Hybrid work, collaboration, teams, organizational behavior, organizational citizenship behavior, trust, distance, experiments, interdisciplinary, remote work, efficiency, performance, virtuality, systems thinking.

Publications

Pedersen et al., (2024) The Hybrid Star: A systems thinking approach to hybrid work. In "Humanizing the Digital Workspace", M. Orel, M. Cerne, S. I Wong (Eds.), Springer Nature. (accepted/in press)