As part of my doctoral research at Liverpool John Moores University, I am researching the impact of hybrid work on employee wellbeing.

Last year, I conducted a survey of hybrid workers, aiming to understand their experiences in-depth, and how they feel that hybrid work influences their wellbeing both positively and negatively.  I am delighted to share, in the first of a short series of posts, some initial preliminary findings.

5 Wellbeing Benefits of Hybrid Work

Five main wellbeing benefits were identified from the analysis of the survey responses.  These are:

• More time for family and home life
• More time for wellbeing related activity
• Improved mental health including reduced stress and anxiety
• Improved work life balance
• Improved physical health including sleep and diet

Many of the themes interlink and overlap.  Many of the respondents gave very detailed responses to this question highlighting multiple wellbeing benefits, with some respondents giving up to five personal examples. One response listed 18 separate points!

The idea of time as a benefit as benefit runs through several of the themes. Hybrid workers value the additional time that working from home provides them and they use it in a variety of different ways.

This graph shows what people do with the time they save when they don’t have to commute:

Within the themes that relate to ‘more time’, survey respondents talked about time for exercise, fitness, hobbies, relaxing, interests, cooking, other people, spending time outdoors, with their children and even dealing with the minutiae of life.  Domestic chores, medical appointments and school runs all become easier to balance when working from home for some of the week.  ‘Doing the washing’ came up often.  Hybrid workers no longer need to load these activities into weekends, utilise annual leave or struggle to fit them around a commute.

This word cloud shows the responses visually, in which you can see the prominence of the idea of ‘more time’.  If you look to the bottom right you will see a reference to ‘dog’ – there were a surprising number of references to having time to walk or spend time with the dog.  Alas for the cat lovers – only one reference to them!

Early in the enforced remote work period that resulted from the pandemic, there were concerns about the mental health impacts of remote work, especially in relation to isolation. My research has found that, although some people do report this, others say that being free from the stress of the commute, as well as stressors that relate to attending the office, is actually good for their overall mental health.

Of course there are challenges alongside the benefits too. I will be sharing more about those in a future post. In the meantime, it looks like the dog lovers are winning!

The next phase of my research will involve interviewing senior HR professionals about their perceptions on hybrid work and wellbeing in their organisation.  If you would be willing to be interviewed for around 30-45 minutes (you can be anonymous) I’d love to hear from you.

A brief note on methodology.  A total of 412 responses were received to the survey, which included both qualitative and quantitative questions.  Qualitative data was analysed thematically in Nvivo.