Who should come to the office? – Toward a decision support tool for hybrid work

Across the world, companies and employees collected positive experiences while working from home (WFH) during the national COVID-19 lockdowns (Ipsen et al., 2021; Vargas, 2020) and investigate currently how these experiences can be implemented into WFH or hybrid-work solutions (Singhal, 2021). Individual solutions and ideas exist already.

Howevermore general solutionsare missing that face the challenges and possibilities for the development of hybrid work that considers different groups of managers and employees but also the company's interests like optimal use of facilities, knowledge sharing, performance, etc. In Denmark, workplaces such as Danske Bank took the first steps toward increasing the use of hybrid work (Jørgensen, 2021), and worldwide, companies are also considering this.

The expectation is that high productivity can be maintained and well-being supported by potentially reducing the number of office workplaces (Lufkin, 2022). The wish to use hybrid working arrangements, where some work from home and others meet 'at work', is creating new forms of collaboration and work processes combined with distance management.

This has led to a discussion about the current legislation on hybrid work and the possible long-term effects (Eurofound, 2022). The new reality raises questions for companies: How do we ensure collaboration and performance when more people WFH - for those who work at home and those who come to work? How can daily (distance) managers, in cooperation with their employees, organize (co-)working in the future? Answers to these questions are still discussed both in research and in practice.

Based on these discussions, our paper aims to find answers to these questions by proposing a decision support tool based on our international results to balance individual, departmental, and company needs for hybrid work.