The Office Versus Home Debate is Missing the Point, Say Researchers

 

A new study argues that where you work matters far less than how much freedom you feel you have while doing it

The debate over hybrid working has dominated business pages for years. How many days should employees spend in the office? What is the right balance between collaboration and autonomy? Is remote work killing company culture?

A new piece of research suggests much of this debate has been looking in the wrong direction.

A study published this month in the Global Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences finds that the single most powerful driver of job satisfaction among hybrid workers is not the number of days they work from home, nor the sophistication of their employer's agility strategy. It is something more immediate, more personal, and more within the control of managers at every level: whether employees feel their organisation is genuinely flexible.

"The location of work is almost a distraction from the real question," said lead author Daniel Obande Haruna of St. Mary's University in London. "What employees are responding to, what actually shapes how satisfied they feel in their jobs, is the degree of autonomy they experience, the responsiveness of their organisation, and how much real decision-making power sits with them rather than several management layers above them."

The study surveyed 100 professionals in hybrid roles across multiple industries and regions, using correlation and regression analysis to examine the relationships between organisational flexibility, agility, hybrid work experience, and job satisfaction. The results were clear. Organisational flexibility, as perceived by employees, was the dominant predictor of satisfaction, outperforming both agility and hybrid work experience once all three were considered together.

Dr Kennedy Oberhiri Obohwemu, Founder and CEO of UK-based PENKUP Research Institute said the findings reframed what employers should be measuring and managing. "The instinct in many organisations is to focus on the structural dimensions of hybrid work, the schedules, the office policies, the technology platforms. This research suggests that the more powerful variable is cultural and relational. Do employees feel trusted? Do they feel heard? Do decisions get made in ways that respect their professional judgement? Those perceptions are what drive satisfaction."

The paper draws a careful distinction between flexibility and agility, two concepts that are frequently conflated in management thinking but that, the authors argue, operate at different distances from the individual employee.

Dr Jennifer Adaeze Chukwu of the World Health Organisation in Abuja explained the distinction. "Agility is about how an organisation responds to external change at a strategic level. Flexibility, as we are using the term, is about what employees experience in their daily working lives. Our data shows that it is the latter that has the more direct and powerful effect on how satisfied people feel."

That finding has particular implications for organisations that have invested heavily in agility frameworks and capability-building, only to find that employee satisfaction has not improved in step.

Dr Ibiangake Friday Ndioho of Arden University in Manchester said the research offered an explanation for that disconnect. "Agility matters, but it operates at a remove from the employee's lived experience. Flexibility is proximal. It is what people feel when they are deciding how to structure their day, when they are asking for a change to their working pattern, or when they are trying to make a judgement call without waiting for approval from above. Get that right, and satisfaction follows."

Dr Charles Leyman Kachitsa of Leeds Trinity University said the implications for leadership were practical and immediate. "This is not a finding that requires a major organisational transformation to act on. Managers at every level have the ability to increase or decrease the flexibility their team members experience. The evidence suggests that doing so has a direct and measurable effect on how satisfied those people are in their work."

The paper is also notable for what it found regarding hybrid work experience more broadly. While employees who rated their overall hybrid experience more positively did report higher job satisfaction, this relationship largely disappeared once organisational flexibility was accounted for. In other words, much of what workers value about hybrid working appears to flow from the flexibility it represents, rather than from the arrangement itself.

Oladipo Vincent Akinmade of the University of Warwick said this was a finding that should prompt employers to reflect carefully on what they are actually offering. "A hybrid work policy that is restrictive, heavily monitored, and slow to respond to employee needs may produce very little of the satisfaction benefit that employers expect from it. The label is not enough. The experience has to match the promise."

Dr Eddy Eidenehi Esezobor of Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia noted that the multi-sector, multi-region sample gave the findings broad applicability. "These results are not confined to a particular type of organisation or a particular national context. They reflect a pattern that appears to hold across different settings, which strengthens confidence in the core message."

Dr Festus Ituah of Regent College London said the human dimension of the findings deserved as much attention as the managerial ones. "Job satisfaction is about the quality of a person's professional life. When we talk about flexibility as a driver of satisfaction, we are ultimately talking about dignity, trust, and the respect that organisations show to the people who work for them. Those are not peripheral concerns."

Jalaleddin Kazemi Fard of Scholars School System in Manchester said the study gave practitioners a concrete basis for decision-making. "There is sometimes a gap between what research says and what leaders feel able to act on. This paper closes that gap. It tells you clearly what matters, and it tells you why."

Jerry Soni of the United Nations World Food Programme in Damascus, who contributed to the study, said the findings resonated with the realities of working in highly distributed international environments. "In settings where teams span time zones and contexts, the organisations that retain and engage their people are consistently the ones that extend genuine trust and flexibility, not just on paper, but in practice."

Okuma Oke Deborah of Teesside University, whose background is in human resource management, said the paper had direct relevance for how HR professionals evaluated the success of hybrid programmes. "We need to move beyond headcount metrics and presence data. The measure that this research points to is perception: do employees feel that their organisation is flexible? If the answer is no, no amount of policy redesign will compensate."

Dr Obioma Chidumaga Aririsukwu of St. François Medical Center in Abuja said the study was a timely reminder that the hybrid work conversation needed to keep employees at its centre. "A great deal of the debate about hybrid working has been conducted from the perspective of organisational efficiency and office utilisation. This research insists that employee experience is not a secondary consideration. It is the primary one."

The researchers conclude with a call for organisations to treat flexibility not as a benefit to be offered, but as a principle to be embedded, in the structures, cultures, and management practices that shape how employees experience their working lives every day.

The study was conducted by researchers from institutions across UK, Nigeria, Spain and Syria, with support from PENKUP Research Institute. It is available open access via https://www.grpublishing.org/journals/index.php/gjhss/article/view/309.

You can also check it out here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/400579309_Employee-Perceived_Organisational_Flexibility_and_Its_Influence_on_Job_Satisfaction_in_Hybrid_Work_Settings