The five articles on hybrid work you should read in 2025
Learn the best home-to-work ratio for optimal performance and tips on managing a successful hybrid team, with this reading list from Alex Newman.
With more organisations requesting staff return to the office for a portion of their working week, hybrid work is becoming the norm. But is this way of working actually beneficial?
To get the latest insights into hybrid working, we asked Professor Alex Newman to choose five of the best articles published in the last year.
Alex Newman is the Associate Dean (Faculty) and a Professor of Management at Melbourne Business School and has been recognised by Australian Research Magazine as a leading researcher in the sub-disciplines of human resources and organisations, and ethics.
His selection includes a mix of easy-to-access academic and practitioner articles. The final two articles in the MIT Sloan Management Review and Harvard Business Review may require a subscription or purchase to read.
Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance
Nicholas Bloom, Ruobing Han and James Liang
Nature
Are there any benefits to hybrid work arrangements?
This was the question Nicholas Bloom and his colleagues set out to answer in this scientific study, the results of which were published in Nature. They randomly assigned employees of a travel company (Trip.com) to a three day or five day in office schedule. Over the six months experiment and for up to two years later, they found no difference in the productivity, performance and rates of promotion between the two groups. However, they found that those working under the hybrid model had higher rates of job satisfaction, and much lower attrition. This was especially the case for female employees.
Is Hybrid Work the Best of Both Worlds? Evidence from a Field Experiment
Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna, Christos A. Makridis and Kyle Schirmann
The Review of Economics and Statistics
In this article, Choudhury and colleagues highlight the results from their study where they looked at how the level of hybrid work—the time spent at home relative to that spent in the office influences employee attitudes and performance. They found that employees who spent around two days in the office per week reported greater work-life balance, higher levels of job satisfaction, and lower isolation than employees who spent more or fewer days in the office. The degree of hybrid work also had no impact on the performance ratings of employees.
Hybrid is here to stay: Critical behaviors for success in the new world of work
Kristin S. Allen, Darrin Grelle, Erin M. Lazarus, Eric Popp and Sara L. Gutierrez
Personality and Individual Differences
In this article Allen and colleagues present the results from three studies on what predicts employees success in a hybrid work environment to assist employees, managers and organisations to best manage hybrid work. They find that individuals with time management skills, those who are able to stay focused and those that are able to adapt are more successful at working remotely. On the flipside – people who thrive interacting with others are less satisfied and effective. Finally, they find that those with greater remote work experience are more effective than those without.
Seven Essential Hybrid Work Tips for Leaders in 2025
MIT SMR Editors
MIT Sloan Management Review
In this article academic experts highlight their essential tips for managing hybrid work teams. These include communicating hybrid work policies transparently, measuring success based on outcomes and letting business units and teams determine in-person schedules. They also highlight the need to discuss boundaries for communication outside of work hours, making time for personal connection when meeting virtually, providing support to the leaders of hybrid teams and understanding the realities of return-to-work mandates.
3 Challenges to Hybrid Work — and How to Overcome Them
Mark C. Bolino and Corey Phelps
Harvard Business Review
There are numerous challenges that hybrid work environments give rise to, particularly around scheduling, culture and productivity. In this article, Bolino and Phelps, highlight the strategies managers might adopt to deal with these. They suggest managers should not focus on how often workers come to the office but which activities are best done in the office. To build and maintain organisational culture, they stress the need for managers to encourage employees to come in for their colleagues and not for the organisation. They also highlight that to foster productivity, it is best to avoid surveillance in favour of supporting employees to manage hybrid working arrangements.
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