When public health orders forced white-collar workers out of their offices in early 2020 in response to COVID-19, they triggered the largest unplanned experiment in recent work history. There was no pilot programme, no phased rollout, and no training for managers suddenly responsible for teams they could no longer see. Just an overnight shift to remote work, held together by Zoom, Teams, and a collective determination to keep working.

Six years on, organisations are still grappling with the fallout. Workers have embraced flexibility and are holding on to it tightly: research cited by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia found that hybrid employees value the arrangement as equivalent to an 8% pay rise, and organisations offering it recorded attrition rates 33% lower than those that did not. Yet a KPMG survey of more than 1300 global CEOs found that 83% (including 82% of Australian chief executives) expected a full return to office within three years.

The gap between those two positions is where the real story of hybrid work lives, according to Manju Ahuja, Scientia Professor in the School of Information Systems and Technology Management at UNSW Business School. Prof. Ahuja, who has spent years studying how remote work shapes decision-making, relationships, and wellbeing, believes there is a more nuanced and important set of issues that need to be discussed.

Hybrid work arrangements have delivered genuine gains in flexibility, access to talent, and daily quality of life. But they have also introduced costs that are harder to measure and easier to ignore: cognitive overload and a constant connectivity that erodes focus, an invisible domestic load that falls disproportionately on women, and a management culture still learning how to lead people it cannot see.

Speaking with Dr Juliet Bourke, Adjunct Professor in the School of Management and Governance at UNSW Business School for The Business Of, a UNSW Business School podcast, Prof. Ahuja drew on her research to explain what the hybrid experiment has revealed, what it has cost, and what leaders and workers must do now if flexibility is to deliver on its potential.

A permanent shift, not a temporary measure

Prof. Ahuja explained that the shift to remote work was not a gradual process in which organisations learned, adjusted, then learned again. It was, in her words, “one shot”. The consequence is that many of the tensions visible in workplaces today can be traced back to arrangements that were never properly designed in the first place.

“Two things are happening simultaneously,” she said. “Employees want to work from home; they don’t want to give it up. But some employers want people to come back because they think it’s better for productivity, and if they can’t see people working, they don’t know if they’re really working. They feel like the team culture is not there, and they find it hard to monitor.”

The flexibility that workers are defending comes at a price that does not appear on any balance sheet. The same technology that allows a parent to respond to an email during school hours also allows a manager to send a message at 10pm. The result is what Ahuja terms “tech intrusion”: a constant connectivity that has blurred the boundary between work time and personal time, degrading the quality of both.

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“There are benefits,” she acknowledged. “I could be at my daughter’s ballet recital and answer some emails; you feel productive, you feel like you got something done. But the problem with this constant connectivity, this always-on mentality, is that you lose focus: the kind of focus you need for creativity, for deep work.”

Research on the psychology of attention has explored this issue. Gloria Mark, a Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, found that it takes an average of nearly 23 minutes to fully regain focus after an interruption. For a knowledge worker fielding notifications throughout the day, the cumulative cost to productive output is substantial, even when the day feels busy and responsive.

Two kinds of productivity

The “always-on” problem points to an important distinction in the hybrid work debate: the difference between the kind of productivity that is visible and the kind that actually matters. Getting through a long list of tasks in short bursts can feel efficient. But it is not the same as doing the thinking that drives innovation, quality decision-making, and long-term value creation.

“We think we are more productive, but actually we’re not,” Prof. Ahuja told Prof. Bourke. “There’s one type of productivity, where you get this done and then that done in small bursts. But there’s another, more meaningful, more really relevant productivity, where you’re getting real thinking done, you’re creative, you are making good decisions. And those are the things that matter in the long run.”

This issue is compounded by what Prof. Ahuja calls “fast switching”: the rapid toggling between tasks that people commonly describe as multitasking. She referenced a personal conversation with the late Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian-American psychologist who developed the theory of flow, to make the point.

“He said young people get into this flow of multitasking,” recalled Prof. Ahuja, “because the fact is, there’s no such thing as multitasking. We cannot do two things at a time. So what we’re doing is fast switching, which is where we lose focus, and so we can’t really do anything quite well.”

With most work tasks, she noted that people genuinely get better and/or faster with practice. “With multitasking, we get worse over time,” she said. “The reason is that there’s this exhaustion that sets in, and the brain becomes less and less effective and quicker.”

The gender dimension

One group is bearing a disproportionate share of the costs associated with hybrid work. Prof. Ahuja’s research on couples who both work from home found that when the workplace moves into the home, the domestic workload does not redistribute; it accumulates alongside the professional one – and women carry more of it.

“What we’ve found is that women were doing more of the invisible work, which is cognitive load on top of their workload,” she said. “They are definitely affected more by it.” The study explored what happens when two partners share a workspace and negotiate the division of domestic responsibilities: who picks up the children, who prepares dinner, who pays the bills, all of it occurring across the same unstructured working day.

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This presents issues with regard to both retention and wellbeing. The workers most likely to leave if flexible arrangements are withdrawn are women and highly skilled professionals, according to Prof. Ahuja: “[these are the] people you want to keep; the scarce resources.”

What managers have had to learn

Six years on from the pandemic, managers have (finally) acquired skills they were never trained for. The most significant shift has been from presence-based supervision towards outcome-based trust. However, not all managers have embraced this shift willingly.

“What we have learned in our research is that people are looking at a range of supervising skills,” Prof. Ahuja explained. “I would trust people to do things until they prove me otherwise, and if there’s something that I feel needs supervision, then I’ll start monitoring more. So they’re learning to do this agile management, which can vary from task-to-task, team-to-team, person-to-person.”

In her research, Prof. Ahuja recalled one manager who told their team they had hired a person six months earlier, had never met them in person, but were not concerned because the work was getting done.

While this example is a sound illustration of outcome-focused management (born of necessity), the issue of organisational culture building is a trickier one. Many organisations assumed that bringing people back into the office on certain days would generate cohesion organically. Research proves otherwise, according to Prof. Ahuja.

“When people don’t want to come in, and they are made to come in, what happens is that they look for workarounds,” she said. “So they come in, have a coffee with a friend, have a meeting, and then they leave.”

This is referred to as “coffee badging”: physically swiping in or logging on at work, spending a short time in the building, then leaving to go home. Alongside it sits “hush hybrid”, which is an informal arrangement in which an employee negotiates with their manager to attend fewer days than an organisation’s formal policy might otherwise require, Prof. Ahuja explained.

Australia’s culture, communication, and the right to disconnect

Prof. Ahuja, who originally hails from the US, explained that the conversation about hybrid work arrangements has a unique cultural dimension in Australia. She has observed this firsthand in workplace communication, for example. “I have a habit of sending out a two-sentence email which gets right to the point,” she said. “And what I’ve learned here is that no, emails here start with ‘happy Friday’ and end with ‘cheers’ and ‘hope your weekend’s going well.’ And now I have learned to write my email, and then I pad it in the front and back.”

The relational warmth that Australian workplace culture delivers in person does not transfer automatically to digital channels. Rather, it must be consciously constructed.

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Prof. Ahuja also observed that Australians are especially particular about protecting their personal time – so particular, in fact, that it has been enshrined in legislation. Under the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2) Act 2024, most Australian employees gained an enforceable right to disconnect from 26 August 2024: the right to refuse to monitor, read, or respond to employer contact outside working hours.

This was a necessary development, Prof. Ahuja asserted. “Companies, as well as countries, are thinking about this. Many countries have gone on to require companies to have specific policies around communication: when, where, and to have that published.”

What leaders still need to learn

While Australian organisations are generally “quite prepared” with regard to managing hybrid working arrangements, Prof. Ahuja said the most important remaining gap is time management as an organisational design principle.

“One big thing we all need to learn, employees and employers, is time management and self-management, but also, from a manager’s perspective, blocking out time for deep work, deep thinking, for creative work, where you’re not interrupted (unless there’s something urgent),” Prof. Ahuja said. “And then from the employee’s perspective, how to manage their time, where this creating separation deliberately is important for them too.”

She highlighted the importance of appropriate policies in setting ground rules. “My biggest recommendation would be to have clear policies around all these things we’ve been talking about, rather than having ad hoc yet leaving room for flexibility that managers can have autonomy around,” said Prof. Ahuja.

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“So that means we train managers to supervise, to monitor, and how to do that. It means that we have policies that are consistent around communication, deep thinking, time and so on. It means we think about employee wellbeing and their right to disconnect. It means that we create a culture of trust. We create a culture of outcome measurement, rather than process measurement and presence.”

Hybrid work FAQ: Five key takeaways for business leaders

Redefine what productivity means. Presence is not productivity. Leaders who measure output by activity rather than impact are using the wrong instrument. Building a culture of outcome measurement requires clarity about what good work looks like, and trust that people will do it.

Protect time for deep work. The erosion of focused thinking is one of the least visible costs of always-on working. Designate protected time for creative and analytical work, and establish clear norms about when out-of-hours contact is and is not appropriate.

Design for culture, not just presence. Mandating attendance does not produce cohesion. Coordinate which days people come in so that the overlap is real, structure social time deliberately, and give people a reason to be there.

Address the gender imbalance. The invisible load carried by women in hybrid arrangements is both a wellbeing concern and a retention risk. Building awareness of it into the design of flexible arrangements is a necessary starting point.

Build clear policies, not informal understandings. Hush hybrid and coffee badging are symptoms of a policy vacuum. Clear, published expectations around communication, attendance, and working hours reduce the overhead of constant informal negotiation.

Train managers for the work they are actually doing. Agile supervision, outcome-based assessment, and deliberate culture building are skills that need to be developed and supported, not assumed.

If organisations can implement these steps, Prof. Ahuja said the gains are real and worth protecting: “There are so many benefits to remote work, but we have to do it mindfully: partly because it has a cost for wellbeing, a cost for relationships, and a cost for work outcomes such as creativity and innovation and deep thinking,” said Prof. Ahuja, who concluded that the organisations most likely to make flexibility work are those that take those costs as seriously as the benefits.