Manchester University Talk

Dr Matthew Davis gives a talk titled "Hybrid working and the future workplace" for Alliance Manchester Business School’s Organisational Psychology Research Seminar Series.

Talk summary:

COVID-19 changed where we work. Hybrid working (working from multiple workspaces e.g., office, client sites, home, third spaces) has become mainstream. This work arrangement is preferred by office-based employees in the UK and across the EU (e.g., Davis et al., 2022; Eurostat, 2022). In this presentation Matthew discusses the knowledge gap that this shift to hybrid and more flexible forms of working creates, specifically in terms of the changing experience of work itself and how the future workplace needs to be adapted.

Matthew will draw on findings from his multidisciplinary ESRC funded Adapting Offices research project (https://futureworkplace.leeds.ac.uk/) to demonstrate: the range of arrangements that may be considered "hybrid working"; the value of applying socio-technical systems principles to inform the design of the future workplace; the influence of location autonomy (i.e., autonomy over where to work) in shaping employee outcomes under hybrid working; how contemporary office environments can support work-life balance via task-space fit. The research project involved stakeholder interviews, longitudinal employee interviews, industry workshops, cross-sector office worker surveys, a half-daily diary study of office workers, social network study of office workers.