Hybrid working has transformed how and where we work. Once seen as an exception, it’s now an expectation. But does hybrid truly work for dual-career parents, and how could it function better for everyone?
As his research develops, Dr Benjamin Bader, Professor of International Human Resource Management, writes about what hybrid work really means for fairness, flexibility, and the future of work itself.
Contents:
- What is hybrid working?
- The evolution of hybrid working
- Changing attitudes to hybrid working
- The complications of hybrid working
- But what makes hybrid actually work for families?
- What responsibility do organisations have to support workers with families?
- Case study: The MBA Hybrid Work Challenge
- What might be the future of hybrid work?
- Organisations – help us with our research
What is hybrid working?
Hybrid working describes a model in which employees divide their time between working remotely and on-site, such as in an office or shared workspace.
At its best, hybrid working combines the flexibility of remote work with the collaboration and connection of in-person environments. Ideally, it offers workers more control over where and how they work, improving balance, productivity, and wellbeing.
When people talk about hybrid work, they often describe it as a benefit. But hybrid work isn’t simply a perk. It’s a tool which has the power for change, especially for working parents.
At Newcastle University Business School, I’m conducting a study exploring hybrid work and parenthood in the UK, to understand how organisations can make hybrid work sustainable and fair for working families. In this two-stage study, together with colleagues from Northumbria and University of York, we first spoke with working parents and now are interviewing HR managers in the UK to get their perspective, too.
While hybrid work has undoubtedly increased flexibility and retention, it has also exposed inequalities, blurred boundaries, and raised questions about fairness, culture, and visibility at work.
The evolution of hybrid working
Academics have often worked in a hybrid way, long before it became mainstream. Much of my own research involves collaborating with colleagues all over the world, which means working virtually and asynchronously across time differences has been normal for years.
For example, I’ve co-authored papers with people I’ve only met a handful of times in over a decade. It works, but it’s not without its own difficulties. You lose some of the immediacy of face-to-face work, but gain invaluable connections with those you wouldn’t usually meet. You lose clear boundaries between work and home life, but gain flexibility and freedom.
In the corporate world ten years ago, hybrid work was a rather niche thing. Then came Covid-19, and suddenly, what had been the exception became the global norm. The world’s businesses and organisations were forced to adapt, and soon hybrid work became a defining feature of modern employment wherever the nature of work allowed it.
Yet, it’s not quite as simple as that.
While most workers accepted or even embraced the change, the organisational structures, expectations, and boundaries have been slower to evolve.
Changing attitudes to hybrid working
Pre-pandemic, hybrid arrangements were often viewed as a privilege. They might have been a sign of managerial trust, special dispensation for a special project, or even a reward for good performance.
Now, hybrid work is an expectation. Employees want flexibility, autonomy, and balance. However, this shift in mindset hasn’t been matched by consistent implementation.
While conducting our study, interviews with HR leaders have shown that while hybrid work might be embedded across organisations, how it's implemented and managed remains uneven. Some line managers embrace it wholeheartedly, while others still equate visibility with commitment to a company or responsibilities. HR professionals often find themselves navigating between organisational policy and individual managerial discretion, frequently trying to make hybrid systems fair across the workforce without removing flexibility.
The complications of hybrid working
For dual-career families – couples with children, where both partners have their own full-time jobs and careers – hybrid work has been transformative. Parents can structure their days around both work and care responsibilities in ways that were once impossible. Many working parents told us that hybrid work helped them stay in the workforce, spend more time with their children, and manage complex lives more sustainably.
Nonetheless, the story isn’t all positive. Across our interviews, HR leaders as well as parents consistently noted that flexibility hasn’t equalised the load. Instead, it’s redistributed it.
HR leaders repeatedly described how hybrid work has improved flexibility for mothers but not necessarily equality. While it allows many to remain in their roles, it often reinforces the societal expectation that mothers should be the ones to shoulder most of the ‘mental load’ of family life, often managing childcare, school schedules, and emotional labour. Hybrid work might make it easier for mothers to ‘do it all,’ but often at personal cost. The result is frequently ‘doing it all, all of the time’. Many work late into the evening, multitask through meetings, or skip breaks to stay on top of everything.
In this case, hybrid work has blurred boundaries between responsibilities, rather than balancing them. In this way, we are still far away from gender equality at work.
But what makes hybrid actually work for families?
Early research findings suggest that hybrid working is an instrument that can make a massive difference to lives, but it’s not being implemented as effectively as it could.
The clearest insight from our interviews is that structure matters. Clear expectations, consistent communication, and empathetic management make a significant difference. When hybrid systems are defined and not left to interpretation, they have the potential to enable true flexibility rather than hidden overwork.
In that sense, the problem isn’t hybrid work itself — it’s the lack of clarity surrounding it.
Inconsistent expectations across teams, managers, and departments create confusion. Some employees feel empowered; others feel invisible. For parents, unclear systems often mean extra ‘invisible work’, such as negotiating who’s home which day, managing guilt, and constantly balancing conflicting demands. And if there is a clash in both parents’ work schedules, it is typically the mother who is stepping back, even when both parents theoretically have the opportunity to make use of flexible working arrangements.
Our research also highlighted tensions between different groups of employees. Hybrid work tends to favour office-based and knowledge workers, while frontline and production staff have fewer options for flexibility. HR leaders are acutely aware of this, but solutions so far are ad hoc — shift swapping, compressed hours, or recognition schemes rather than systemic reform.
Flexibility without fairness risks widening divides, not closing them.
What responsibility do organisations have to support workers with families?
Hybrid work isn’t simply about giving people choice. It’s about designing work systems that align with human needs. It’s about creating an organisational structure that offers flexibility without anxiety or guilt.
Organisations have a responsibility to make hybrid work workable. That might mean training managers to lead hybrid teams effectively and empathetically, or setting transparent expectations around presence, communication, and performance.
But it’s also about recognising that flexibility alone doesn’t guarantee fairness.
Our research found that in the vast majority of organisations, line managers are the ultimate make-or-break factor. Supportive, understanding managers help employees thrive, while unsympathetic ones create stress and disengagement. Yet many organisations still provide little to no formal training in managing hybrid teams.
The most forward-thinking organisations are those that link hybrid work to broader inclusion, wellbeing, and cultural strategies. They treat hybrid working not as an operational issue, but a structural one.
Case study: The MBA Hybrid Work Challenge
In order to create greater awareness for this topic, I also brought it into the classroom in an example of research-led teaching. With my MBA class, I ran a hybrid work challenge to explore the complications that come from designing HR policies around flexible working. For this, I created a fictional company (NorthTech) with a couple of thousand employees. I split my MBA students into five groups, and randomly assigned them all different employee groups to represent. These included early-career workers, parents with young children, blue-collar production workers, middle managers, and employee union representatives.
Their task was to come up with a proposal for a hybrid work policy for NorthTech that they would then present to the company’s board. This would cover who could work remotely and how often, how hybrid arrangements would be monitored and supported, measures to ensure fairness, implications for culture and career development, and any additional support needed, such as childcare and training. The groups would listen to each other’s proposals, identify overlaps and conflicts, and try to revise their own policy.
While all students created insightful policies for their own worker groups, issues arose with the second part of the challenge; if this was a real company, which policy should it adopt? It became apparent that while it was simpler to defend one subgroup’s perspective, it was far more difficult to make an overarching decision which remained fair across different role requirements and personal circumstances.
What might be the future of hybrid work?
Hybrid work has helped many dual-career parents stay in the workforce, but not without cost. What happens next is likely dependant on the location and the industry. Why would companies choose to limit themselves to locally-based talent, when they recruit nationwide? Not everyone is willing or able to move their family’s lives to a new town or country for a job, and in a world where hybrid working is implemented thoughtfully, why should they?
The next stage in its evolution isn’t about where people work, but how organisations enable sustainable performance, connection, and equity across all staff. To get there, we need systems that balance flexibility with fairness, autonomy with inclusion, and personal wellbeing with collective accountability. One example of hybrid working’s evolution is Daimler AG, the German automaker. In contrast to many organisations with a hybrid policy where the line manager ultimately decides upon the office days, employees and their managers decide together what their individual combination of remote and on-site work will be. The policy clearly and explicitly addresses the employees’ need for flexibility and puts this freedom to choose front and centre.
I believe hybrid work has immense potential, but only if we treat it as a deliberate design choice, not an optional perk.
Organisations – help us with our research
Our research continues, and we’re eager to hear from HR professionals, managers, and business leaders across the UK.
If you’re involved in shaping hybrid work practices and would like to share your perspective, please email me to discuss. Together, we can help build hybrid systems that truly work — for parents, for families, and for the future of work.
You might also like…
- find out more about Dr Benjamin Bader, Professor of International Human Resource Management at Newcastle University
- explore more research at the Newcastle University Business School
