Just like home? Temporal and moral coordination of everyday life in times of hybrid work

Abstract

Hybrid work has gained renewed attention post-COVID-19, prompting shifts in how we practice work and use digital technologies to both integrate and separate work and home in time and space. While often presented as flexible and individualized, hybrid work is deeply embedded in daily routines in the home and in collective rhythms. This paper examines how hybrid worker communities in Denmark reconfigure these rhythms and coordinate activities across the domains of work and home life. Drawing on social practice theory, Southerton's concepts of collective rhythms, and Mary Douglas’ notion of moral coordination, we analyze in-depth interviews with hybrid workers from IT, knowledge and care sectors. We show how hybrid work contributes to a de-institutionalization of collective rhythms, loosening but not displacing the traditional 8–16 workday, which continues to function as a ‘ground beat’ in everyday life. This shift creates both new flexibility and new demands for coordination across domains, requiring workers to engage in ongoing temporal and moral negotiations. Digital tools play a central role in this coordination, offering new flexibility but also risks, including new forms of exposure. We argue that hybrid work does not dissolve the boundaries between work and home but reconfigures them through evolving practices of coordination. In doing so, it reshapes how time, visibility, and care are coordinated in post-pandemic everyday life.

Introduction

During the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home was normalized in many sectors, reshaping everyday life and blurring the spatial and temporal boundaries separating work and home life. Pandemic lockdowns disrupted established time-space arrangements of social life, prompting massive alterations in how work is organized and experienced. In the aftermath, hybrid working has emerged as a lasting and transformative mode of organizing work. It enables people to work across multiple locations and times, raising questions about how shared rhythms, coordination, and boundaries are sustained or reconfigured. Consequently, hybrid working has become one of the most intriguing themes in work culture after the COVID-19 pandemic (Neeley, 2021).

The transition towards hybrid work has often been interpreted as a process of individualization, where disciplining descends from external to internal control due to the erosion of classical temporal, spatial, and ideological structures, and research has raised concerns about risks of boundlessness, stress, and work colonizing home life (see, e.g., Allen et al., 2021; Bean et al., 2021; Dawes et al., 2021). These critiques highlight how hybrid work may undermine collective rhythms and increase demands for self-management. Interestingly, however, despite the challenges it imposes, more studies find that many workers express satisfaction with hybrid work and wish for more of it (see, e.g., DE, 2022; Shirmohammadi et al., 2022). This is also the case in Denmark. By 2022, more than double the working hours were conducted from home compared to pre-pandemic times, still, more than a third of the Danish employees already having the opportunity for working from home wished for even more remote work (DE, 2022).

When boundaries of work and domestic life change, established collective temporalities are challenged. This paper explores how Danish hybrid working employees integrate and balance work and domestic life through the coordination of practices across work and home. The analysis studies hybrid work through the lens of everyday life and is inspired by practice theory (Blue, 2019; Shove et al., 2012; Southerton, 2003, 2020; Walker, 2021), and Mary Douglas’ conceptualization of the home as a site of creating social order through temporal and moral coordination (Douglas, 1991). These theoretical perspectives foreground hybrid work not just as individual scheduling activities, but as embedded in collective rhythms, norms, negotiations and shared spatial–temporal arrangements.

In studies that focus on the temporal and spatial boundary work of separating work from domesticity, home life is often conceived as a sensitive setting that must be protected from invading work (Wapshott and Oliver, 2011; Wethal, 2022). However, as studies on everyday life show, like work, home is also a network of routines and tasks that needs to be organized and structured in time and space (Gullestad, 1991). Furthermore, Douglas has argued that the home has distinct ways of bringing time and space under control, which all household members are subordinate to and participate in, where timing and synchronization is used to make the home a meaningful and socially coherent place (Douglas, 1991). Studying hybrid working through this lens allows us to discover not only the risks of intrusion, but also how home-based rhythms, routines, and moral orders are brought into hybrid work. This study asks: How are spatiotemporal boundaries and temporal rhythms of work and domestic life negotiated and coordinated in post-COVID hybrid working practices?

Empirically, the paper draws on in-depth interviews conducted in 2022–2023 with hybrid workers employed in the knowledge, IT and welfare sectors in Denmark. The analysis of this material reveals how the digital technologies employed in hybrid work support the creation of time-spaces where work practices unfold, are maintained, and negotiated with work colleagues. The study finds that using digital technologies, hybrid workers create a moral system bringing time and space under control that cannot be reduced to individual self-disciplining. Rather, bridging work and home through constant and dynamic negotiations of meaning and duty, presence and absence, in the digital space, hybrid workers both reconfigure and maintain the temporal organization of everyday life. This reconfiguration of collective rhythms in the everyday life is making hybrid work liveable and meaningful rather than merely blurring boundaries of work and home. The paper argues that hybrid workers’ use of digital technologies to manage time and coordination reconfigures the boundaries between home and work, thereby renegotiating traditional time hierarchies and the moral status of paid and unpaid labor.

The paper is structured as follows: First, it explores the literature on working from home, highlighting the pandemic-related surge and its long pre-pandemic tradition. Then, the theoretical approach is outlined, detailing guiding concepts and perspectives. The methods section describes our research design, data collection process, and material. Next, we present our analysis, structured around four key findings. The discussion interprets these results, connecting them to the broader literature and considering their implications, including inequalities linked to changes in working practices. Finally, the conclusion summarizes key insights and suggests future research directions.

Background: History and prevalence of hybrid work

More than double the number of EU citizens work hybrid today compared to pre-pandemic levels (Eurofound, 2022). In Denmark, the share of employed persons working from home was above the EU average already before the pandemic (Eurostat, 2020), with 8–12% of the workforce working remotely at least half of the time and an additional 27–30% working remotely at least one day per month (Statistics Denmark, 2021). At the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, over half of the Danish workforce was instructed to stay home during subsequent lockdown periods (Christensen et al., 2024: 36). Among them, 73% engaged in remote work. Additionally, 18% of workers who were not formally send home during lockdowns also reported doing remote work during the pandemic. Consequently, for many, their homes became their workplace due to COVID-19. This shift brought domestic time-spaces and rhythms into the center of working life, challenging traditional notions of work culture and its spatiotemporal foundations (Belu et al., 2021; White-Hancock, 2023).

In some cases, physical workplaces have ceased to exist altogether, while in many sectors, hybrid work has evolved significantly, demanding new practices and skill sets (Winchester-Seeto and Piggott, 2020). However, the idea of the “death of distance” (Cairncross, 1997) and the liberation of work and modern life from spatial and temporal constraints were anticipated decades earlier, as terms like “telecommuter” and “telework” were coined already in the 1970s (Nilles, 1994) and with the concept of “connected presence” in the 2000s (Christensen, 2009; Licoppe, 2004). Fisher and Fisher (2001) emphasize that current hybrid work encompasses not only spatial diversity but also temporal and cultural variations (Edwards et al., 2023; Fisher and Fisher, 2001). Where, when, and how work is done has thus become increasingly fluid, shaped by both technological infrastructures and evolving norms and cultures. Something that was further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Existing research on post-COVID hybrid work

During COVID-19, hybrid work spread rapidly, and managing work-life balances often proved challenging as workers were suddenly forced to carry out work tasks in their domestic environments (Cho et al., 2022; Lark, 2022; Watson et al., 2021). Yarberry and Sims (2021) point out that when moving from brick-and-mortar office buildings to other physical locations, workers were not only forced to work virtually but also to work alone. They find that the lack of physical contact with colleagues challenges engagement and potentially impedes career development and progress, and interviewees described missing the office (ibid). Bean et al. (2021) have shown how lack of in-person interaction caused anxiety and sleep disturbances among homeworkers. Similarly, studies during lockdowns demonstrated that it has been difficult to demarcate work from the home domain, revealing that domestic spaces are governed by their own rhythms and spatiotemporal structures, which hybrid work can disturb. For example, Dawes et al. (2021) conducted an interview study with parents during the pandemic and found that they experienced stress and exhaustion from navigating multiple pressures and conflicting responsibilities in the home. In line with other studies, they found that this held especially true for women and single parents (Beno, 2021; Cockayne, 2021; Craig, 2020; Dawes et al., 2021).

Burk et al. (2020) examined pandemic motherhood for women working in academia and argued that telecommuting has led to an unideal merger of their personal and professional spaces. Cannito and Scavarda's (2020) study of remote workers found that remote work does not improve the work-life balance and does not modify gender normative roles within the domestic domain; rather, it reproduces and sometimes exacerbates gender inequalities. Such findings are not limited to the situation during the pandemic. For many years, studies have shown how hybrid working blurs the boundaries of home and work (Gant and Kiesler, 2002), often reinforcing the existing gendering of home and family practices (Tietze and Musson, 2002).

More recently, scholars have begun exploring the ambivalent qualities of hybrid work. Nuancing hybrid work during the pandemic, Ding and Williams (2022) point out that the spatial integration of home and work, so-called “carescapes” and “workscapes,” into a single domain presents both tensions and benefits such as work disruptions and enhanced schedule flexibility. Fukumura et al. (2021) surveyed working-from-home experiences in the United States, revealing that despite challenges, many respondents expressed a desire to continue working remotely. Similarly, a Danish survey conducted in 2022 showed that for respondents working home during the COVID-19 lockdowns, only 12% reported experiences of higher levels of stress, whereas 38% reported to have gained a better balance between work and family life (Christensen et al., 2024). Still, the survey paints a mixed picture in the sense that it indicates the existence of a substantial minority of workers experiencing the forced remote working as leading to higher levels of loneliness and isolation.

This emerging literature invites us to ask not only what hybrid work does to people, but also how people make hybrid work livable and coordinate the activities and rhythms of work and home.

Theoretical approach

Contributing to the literature on hybrid work after the pandemic and its ambivalent qualities, this paper draws on social practice theory to explore the practices that condition and enable coordinating work and home life, and to understand how rhythm and control are established in hybrid work. In practice theory, practices are understood as nexuses of doings and sayings (Schatzki, 1996), i.e., “open-ended spatial–temporal manifolds of actions” (Schatzki, 2005: 471), that are constituted by connected elements. Which elements are in focus vary between different branches of practice theories. In this paper we adopt a focus on skills, meanings, and materials, following Shove et al. (2012), to understand how hybrid work practices are materially and temporally organized in everyday life and within home settings. To take an example, the practice of childcaring entails a range of skills such as pedagogical expertise, the ability to comfort and discipline children, and performing tasks like diaper changing. Moreover, it involves understandings about caregiving, what good parenting is, suitable nutrition, age-appropriate behaviors, and safety measures. Additionally, childcaring is supported by various materials such as toys, tables and bibs. Importantly, childcaring intertwines in time and space with other practices such as feeding, cleaning, transporting, planning, and, with hybrid working, also professional tasks.

Taking a practice-theoretical approach means approaching everyday life as intertwined bundles and complexes (Pantzar and Shove, 2010; Shove et al., 2012) or systems (Watson, 2012) of practices. Following Shove et al. (2009), but also Blue (2019), the temporalities of the everyday life are the outcome of practices and how they interrelate. Central here is the coordination of activities across practices and practitioners, as “different practices produce their own temporal demands based upon the degree to which they require coordination (or synchronization) with other people or practices” (Southerton, 2013: 343). Systems of practices establish recurrent and collective temporal rhythms across scales, from the day-to-day rhythms of the individual home to societal patterns like traffic jams and electricity consumption load peaks, and these collective rhythms helps keeping practices in place in time and space by coordinating much social life and establish social routines (Blue, 2019; Southerton, 2003, 2020). We use the term collective rhythms to refer to temporal patterns that coordinate practices collectively, aligning them in time and space across societal or institutional scales (Southerton, 2003). Key in establishing these collective rhythms are what Southerton (2009) has termed institutionally timed events, such as fixed working hours, fixed mealtimes, restricted shopping hours, and former traditions of washing clothes on specific weekdays. However, since at least the mid-twentieth century, the institutionally ordering of collective rhythms has weakened as “institutionally timed events are no longer as fixed within the temporal rhythms of daily life” (ibid.: 51) as they were before, leading to the undermining of collective coordination of practices. The result of this is double: In one sense, the de-institutionalization of collective rhythms gives higher flexibility in people's timing of practice performances, but at the same time it requires more efforts dedicated to the coordination and timing of doings, especially when it involves other people. Hybrid working contributes to a further de-institutionalization of collective rhythms, which makes studies on how hybrid workers coordinate their everyday practices across work and home particularly interesting.

The practice-theoretical lens enables us to view work as a densely woven systems of practices, organized in time and space and sustained by collective rhythms. From this perspective, home is another system of practices, structured by different rhythms and norms. When these two systems, home and work, are collapsed into the same space under hybrid conditions, both must be reconfigured. This reconfiguration does not simply blur boundaries but involves explicit negotiation of temporality, routines, spatial roles, and material arrangements, as well as implicit and subtle adjustments of norms and ethics in work life.

To understand how workers draw on home-based practices to bring hybrid work under control, this paper takes inspiration from Mary Douglas’ conceptualization of the home as the act of bringing space under control as articulated in “The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space” from 1991. We recognize that practice theory and Douglas’ cultural theory emerge from distinct ontological traditions, but we see them as complementary in this study. While practice theory helps us analyze the rhythms, routines, and interactions that organize hybrid work in time and space, we introduce Douglas’ concepts to situate these practices within shared normative frameworks that govern and give meaning to them. Taken together, these perspectives enable us to capture both the performance and coordination of practices of hybrid work and the normative negotiations that regulate these practices across domains and sustain boundaries and rhythms.

Here, Douglas offers her seminal definition of the home, arguing that: “(…) home is always a localizable idea. Home is located in space, but it is not necessarily a fixed space. It does not need bricks and mortar (..) but space there must be, for home starts by bringing some space under control” (1991: 289). According to Douglas, the home is grounded in routine action and regulation rather than a fixed physical form. It is an ongoing activity of coordination, where routine, rhythm, and order are used to ensure fair access to goods (ibid: 300). Time and timing are key. The home introduces temporal rules, such as expected presence at certain times, and involves continuous negotiation of rights and responsibilities. As such, the home is a model for different kinds of distributive justice (ibid: 297), which is not abstract but enacted through temporal coordination, such as shared meals and fixed bedtimes. While this control can be flexible and negotiated, it also introduces rigidity and uniformity, for example by requiring synchronization in terms of common presence at fixed points in the day and not allowing self-exclusion from shared rhythms (ibid: 305). In this perspective home is both a space of meaning, protection and belonging, and a place of constraint and potential tyranny. Thus, Douglas’ thinking is helpful in framing the ambivalence of hybrid work at home, as the same rhythms and rules than enable coordination and control can also generate conflict and contestation. In this paper, we use ‘coordination’ to describe how rhythms are aligned, either implicitly through norms and routines or explicitly through negotiation and ‘boundary work’, a term Douglas developed in “Purity and Danger” (2002). Here, Douglas works with ideas of order and control through the concept matters out of place, referring to things that transgress established boundaries and disrupt control. To address this, boundary work becomes crucial. With the concept, Douglas underscores how establishing, advocating for, and reinforcing boundaries is necessary to restore control and distinctions—in her text between ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’, in our case, between ‘home’ and ‘work’.

Bringing these theoretical traditions together, we use the concepts of collective rhythms, (moral) coordination and boundary work to analyze how hybrid workers actively build and maintain distinctions - and enable meaningful overlaps - between work and home practices. We analyze the boundary work involved in developing new rhythms around hybrid working practices, wherein time-spaces are controlled and coordinated, and this enables the investigation of how hybrid working reorders work life practices, rhythms, moralities and the relation between work and home.

Methods and empirical data

The study is based on qualitative data from 21 semistructured in-depth interviews (Brinkmann and Kvale, 2015) with employees who had transitioned to increased hybrid work as consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. The interviews were conducted in 2022 and 2023, after the pandemic lockdowns had ended and the situation had stabilized. Each interview lasted approximately 1.5 hours and explored how the participants’ work and home lives were organized before, during and after the pandemic, to understand shifts in organization of time and space.

The interviews were conducted in two rounds. The first round included 8 interviews with knowledge workers from different firms and organizations, that had started working from home more than two days a week post-COVID-19. These were carried out in 2022. All participants in this round were selected because their workplaces reflected varying degrees of institutionalized hybrid work.

For the second round, we interviewed multiple employees within the same workplace to better understand how the workers’ altered everyday routines were negotiated in relation to responsibilities and shared rhythms of the working community. We identified two workplaces that both offered hybrid work, but under very different conditions: an IT firm with completely flexible work schedules (7 interviews) and a kindergarten that had introduced the opportunity for their employees to work from home when handling administrative tasks (6 interviews). Interviews were conducted in 2023.

Reflecting, in part, the demographics of the IT, knowledge and welfare workplaces selected, most interviewees identifyied as female (15/21), having children (14/21) and being 35 years old or more (14/21). Our sampling strategy was guided by the intent to capture a range of hybrid work setups across sectors, job types, and domestic responsibilities. By including interviewees from very different contexts, we sought to illuminate the range in hybrid work across different institutional, technological and domestic contexts, to discover variations and similarities in how boundaries, rhythms, and resources are negotiated.

The semi-structured interviews were conducted using an interview guide divided into seven themes (for the rationale behind the guide's structure, see Lindberg et al., 2023): participants’ home and work life, differences between past and present, home tour, remote work, the organization of the workday, broader perspectives, and concluding remarks. The structure was designed to evoke both descriptive and reflective responses while allowing for flexibility and follow-up questions. Photo documentation of participants’ home workspaces was conducted to capture the spatiality and materiality of hybrid work. Many of the spaces we were interested in documenting were digital spaces. Consequently, we also photographed the digital spaces where their work took place. As many of these spaces were not directly accessible, we asked interviewees to take screenshots of the digital spaces of hybrid work described during the interviews. The visual material is used to enrich our understandings of the spatial arrangements and rhythms described in the interviews.

All participants identities and photos have been anonymized. All participants provided written informed consent to be part of the study, for us to publish the study, and to have their photos or other images used.

Our analytical approach involved iterative engagement with the empirical material and theory. This included writing detailed summaries of interviews immediately after their completion, listening and re-listening to recordings, and continuously reading and re-reading pertinent literature. Additionally, we used transcripts and images to recall and compare various perspectives and spaces encountered during the empirical phase. These materials were then discussed in analytical meetings among the authors, where we identified and explored patterns and trends, assessed them through different theoretical lenses, and debated interpretations. The process was collaborative and reflexive, particularly in acknowledging how our own experiences as hybrid workers could strengthen our sensitivity towards certain aspects of the material, while rendering us less attuned to others. We used whiteboard mapping to visualize links between emerging themes and theoretical concepts, as well as to explore tensions, resistances or gaps. This cyclical approach of moving between material, theory, and interpretation mirrors the abductive process (Blaikie, 1993; Lindberg et al., 2023).

Analysis

Four interrelated themes consistently recurred as positive advancements in the interviewees’ accounts of their hybrid work lives: (1) Hybrid work prompts temporal redistribution, as it enables the prioritization of leisure, domesticity, and care within time previously dedicated to paid work, (2) digital tools become infrastructures for moral and temporal coordination, as hybrid workers’ use of shared digital platforms organize work “out of place,” enabling coordination and alignment across individual routines, and (3) hybrid workers reproduce collective rhythms by synchronizing through digital technologies, as these tools help manage both the both the fragmentation of time and the need to maintain shared temporal order. Adding to this, we see that (4) temporal visibility and responsiveness are key in sustaining the hybrid worker community; here, digital visibility becomes a form of currency, demanding that workers share aspects of their private lives to enable ongoing coordination. The following elaborates these analytical findings.

Hybrid work prompts temporal redistribution

Though the redistribution of activities in time could introduce new tensions, the integration of leisure, domestic tasks and caregiving into the time-spaces of the ‘working hours’ consistently emerged as a positive development in the narratives of the interviewees. Balancing paid work, domestic work, leisure and care requires extensive coordination, and all participants relied on digital tools known from the work domain, such as calendars or Google Docs, to facilitate this. When coordination is achieved, hybrid workers describe how the integration of caregiving and domestic work into paid work enables new routines that better complement professional and personal responsibilities and leisure.

Erna, for example, a 44-year-old mother, dog owner, and deputy manager at a kindergarten, explains that she “usually wash clothes at night, where the energy is cheaper, and then hang it to dry in the morning” when she works from home. On these days, she also “enjoys the weather when it's nice, sits in the garden, and takes the dog out for a longer walk.” To Erna, hybrid work allows for taking extra care of herself and her dog, and for shifting the timing of domestic work to adjust this to the temporal rhythms of energy prices to save money. Other examples are Ali, a male kindergarten worker diagnosed with dyslexia late in life, who finds time to join a small class with peers supporting each other in tackling life with the diagnosis, and Dalia, a young mother from the IT-company, who tells that when her child is sick: “(…) I stay home with her, I don’t even think about not doing that, but I did that a lot before, I had a bad conscience when I stayed home, I felt like I should be working when it was between 8 and 16 o’clock,” because hybrid work renders possible working outside standard hours. Jan, a municipal worker who lives alone except when his daughter visits on weekends, explains that he never worked from home before the pandemic, but transitioning to a hybrid setup, he found the time to play golf with his golf partner either before the workday began at 9 AM or in the afternoons: “So you could say that my leisure life expanded,” he explains.

However, this integration did not happen seamlessly but required actively engaging in establishing new routines and boundaries. All interviewees highlighted the importance of temporal and spatial coordination to avoid hybrid work becoming chaotic and stressful. The extensive coordination required in hybrid setups introduces new routines to reorganize and fixate paid work, leisure, domestic work and care work into new rhythms. Digital tools play a central role in facilitating this for many participants. For example, Tara, working in the kindergarten and the mother of a young child, uses her flexible work schedule to work longer hours over four days, giving her an additional day off each week. Regardless of whether it is a workday or her day off, Tara maintains a consistent morning routine, where she “(…) start the day by sitting down with my calendar and finding out what the tasks of the day are, e.g., a parent interview, welcoming a new child, when I need to pick up my son….” Interestingly, Tara does not strictly differentiate between workdays and days off, nor between paid and unpaid work. She views all her tasks, formal job responsibilities, housework, and caregiving, as requiring attention and organization. To manage this, she relies on digital tools like her phone's calendar and Google Docs (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Photo of the participant's iPad—keeping track of tasks using Google Docs (anonymized and translated).

In Tara's digital workspace, her professional schedule appears alongside a document planning her daughter's birthday and a traineeship task for work. This digital convergence allows Tara to rank tasks by importance or deadlines rather than their spatiotemporal domains. It illustrates how hybrid work can restructure temporal hierarchies and priorities, making traditionally invisible or undervalued tasks more comparable to paid work. Thus, hybrid work reshapes temporal orders by enabling redistribution of time between paid and unpaid domains. Here, digital tools are not neutral, but act as infrastructures for morally charged coordination, as the following elaborates.

Digital tools become infrastructures for moral and temporal coordination

By juxtaposing different kinds of labor and care, Tara's example shows how digital tools allow hybrid workers to negotiate the legitimacy of activities across domains and thereby reorganizing the rhythms of everyday life. Drawing on Douglas, we can understand this as a negotiation of order and fairness in hybrid time-spaces. The integration of work and domestic responsibilities becomes not only a logistical effort, but a moral one, where coordination produces visibility and justification. Thus, by integrating these tasks into a shared digital space, Tara achieves a form of distributive justice (Douglas, 1991) concerning time, energy, and recognition. Paid, domestic, and care-related tasks are equally visible and prioritized.

Our material shows how hybrid work not only blurs but actively reconfigures boundaries between visible and invisible forms of labor. Irrespective of age, gender, occupational status, or family structure, interviewees consistently report experiences of having more time for care and leisure due to hybrid working. Our interviewees find it easier to manage their care and home responsibilities when these tasks are integrated and made visible through the same tools as their paid work tasks. Digital tools and coordination practices thus do not simply collapse the boundaries between home and work; they also often render these distinctions even more visible, enabling the reconfiguration of rhythms to accommodate non-paid priorities and thus challenging classical time hierarchies.

Hybrid workers reproduce temporal order by synchronizing through digital technologies

Hybrid workers do not rely solely on individual use of digital technology to manage time. Rather, temporal negotiations are embedded within shared efforts of coordination, shaping not just personal routines but also synchronizing worker communities to establish collective rhythms. In hybrid work, digital tools become key infrastructures for building and sustaining shared rhythms across space.

Within the IT company studied, where employees face no official requirements as to when and where they work, the digital platform Slack serves as a tool for coordinating time and accessibility. Slack is a cloud-based team communication platform developed for businesses, and among other features, it is possible to create “channels” tailored to teams or topics. In the IT-company, the channels function as a digital infrastructure for temporal alignment. An employee holding managerial responsibilities explains: “We have different channels on Slack, this one is called Flex, as you can see. Flex is not a tool for control, rather, it is an information tool so your colleagues know when they can reach you. If you do not post anything in the Flex, Holiday, or Illness channels, it means colleagues can contact you between 8 am and 4 pm.” This statement reflects a tension between nominal flexibility and de facto adherence to the institutional rhythms of traditional working hours. Despite the company's outspoken efforts towards deregulation, the industrial 8 am to 4 pm working day continues to operate as a normative background, implicitly organizing expectations about availability. Thus, while digital tools like Slack enable the deregulation and scattering of collective rhythms, fixed temporalities continue to be reproduced through such tools. Thus, digital technologies not only enable spatiotemporal scattering, but they also become a medium for coordinating activities and synchronizing rhythms across time and space. This is shown in a screenshot from the team's ‘#flex’ channel from the morning of our interview with the employee above, where digital ‘check-ins’ in the ‘#flex’ channel serve as a hybrid version of the morning greeting (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Screenshot from the Slack channel “#flex” from the day of the interview (anonymized and translated).

The initial post indicating the start of the workday is made at 5:30 am, while the final one occurs at 9:11 am. These digital check-ins mirror conventional workplace openings, illustrating that despite the spatial displacement, hybrid workers remain largely adhering to collective rhythms. Even in contexts that privilege flexibilization, synchronous rhythms are crucial for coordination and social cohesion, as Douglas (1991) has noted. Consequently, hybrid workers find themselves still adhering to collective temporal rhythms. This is also reflected in the organizational norms experienced by newer employees, such as Emma, who describes the practice as follows: “We don’t have rules and procedures for it; it's more like a norm. When I started, I was included in these threads, and then I became a part of it. But I haven't heard of anyone being penalized for not using it (…) it's more about timing, like figuring out when you can catch people or schedule meetings, for example.” Emma's experience highlights the practice as a way of becoming visible and integrated into the work collective. In paraphrasing Douglas’ (1991: 300) description of the home, the workplace is not akin to a hotel, where people can come and go as they please. Rather, temporal coordination is key for the community to function, guiding both moral expectations and organizational routines. When working hybrid, a shared spatiality might be under dissolution; still, temporal expectations and alignments persist, enabling cooperation and accountability.

Temporal visibility and reciprocity are key in the hybrid worker collective

Temporal alignment in hybrid work is not only about coordination. It is also about recognition and fairness. In our material, we see how digital visibility becomes the currency of reciprocal coordination, demanding of workers that they share parts of their private lives to access flexibility and inclusion.

The screenshot from Slack (Figure 2) exemplifies how the visibility of leisure and unpaid work through digital platforms manifests within the community of workers. The reconfiguration of rhythms described in the first part of the analysis is thus not confined to changed individual daily routines; it also relates to collective rhythms, such as workday structure. Like in Tara's private Google Docs folder, the coordination between IT-company colleagues in Slack extends beyond formal work tasks to include domestic work and care responsibilities. Thus, one hybrid worker is working from home due to “a huge pile of laundry,” while another is unavailable because she is attending her daughter's first day of school. Note how the daughter is referred to by name, implying that all colleagues know her by name and that one colleague is replying with a festive emoji, indicating cheering and emotional support. Thus, the digital space offers a place not only for coordinating when and where formal work will be conducted, but also for sharing and coordinating other obligations, including domestic work and care work, and providing emotional support. Echoing Douglas’ notion of distributive justice, morality plays a central role in these negotiations. Informal work and private obligations of hybrid workers permeate the work sphere through negotiations and justification of absence from formal tasks. This resembles Douglas’ concept of moral coordination within the home, which involves open and constant communication about fair resource access. But as domestic work and care work enter hybrid workers’ digital spaces of coordination, this necessitates individuals to expose more of their private lives to gain privileges. The hybrid workplace would be unsustainable if its members did not share when they are coming and going and justify why. In hybrid work, they must be willing to share aspects of their private home lives—such as their caregiving abilities, feelings of stress, and even details about their household chores like the size of the laundry pile—to effectively engage in collegial coordination and negotiations and to receive benefits, privileges, care, and resources in return.

Discussion

Our analysis shows how hybrid work involves interpersonal and moral coordination across domains and reshapes the temporal rhythms of everyday life. Rather than just collapsing work and home, hybrid work prompts a reorganization of rhythms that make unpaid work more visible, more coordinated, and more valued, but also more exposed. Through digital coordination, hybrid workers engage in moral negotiations about when and how their time is used, and how they justify their presence or absence to others. These negotiations sustain collective rhythms while enabling flexibility, and they reflect a redefinition of fairness and responsibility in hybrid time-spaces. Drawing on Douglas, we see these emerging practices as expressions of distributive justice, where visibility and coordination are key for accessing shared resources such as time, recognition, and care.

The possibilities of coordinating and integrating activities and rhythms of work and home in the context of hybrid work were valued by the interviewed workers. Even if this was not always easy for them, they appreciated the better opportunities to prioritize leisure, relationships, and unpaid work. Much of the literature has highlighted how hybrid work challenges work-life balance, particularly as work invaded domestic spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., Cho et al., 2022; Lark, 2022; Watson et al., 2021). However, our interviews, conducted two to three years after the pandemic began, indicate that people have increasingly mastered the coordination required to establish these balances—not through a strict separation of domains, but by reconfiguring everyday temporality and cultivating new collective rhythms.

Notably, digital tools for coordination play a critical role in this transformation. These tools are used both by individual workers to organize their time based on task importance rather than domain, and by work communities to ensure temporal alignment and facilitate the collegial interactions. Rather than simply blurring boundaries, as much of the existing literature suggests, digital tools enable reorganization of activities, rendering domestic and professional tasks mutually visible and subject for moral negotiation. This visibility, while productive, also demands new forms of exposure: workers must share aspects of their home lives within the work community to legitimize access to shared resources such as time, care and flexibility, as this becomes a currency in the negotiations that sustain the work community.

While some studies report increased loneliness and stress among hybrid workers (e.g., Bean et al., 2021; Dawes et al., 2021; Yarberry and Sims, 2021), our findings present a contrasting narrative. Interviewees reported that hybrid work made it easier to balance responsibilities and aspirations. In line with Astell-Burt and Feng (2021), we observed that hybrid work was associated with a reorganization of temporal structures in ways that allowed more frequent leisure and caregiving activities, such as visiting nature, playing golf, doing laundry, caring for children, participating in educational support groups, or taking a midday walk. These practices reflect a reordering of everyday life, allowing workers to prioritize unpaid and relational activities in the time-spaces previously reserved for work, without sacrificing professional responsibilities.

Our findings suggest that many employees and workplaces have developed routines that balance flexibility with collective rhythms, often through use of digital tools, while maintaining a sense of collegial community. These digital routines in many ways resemble household coordination practices, as described by Douglas, where timing and moral expectation shape a shared rhythm. In hybrid workplaces, these principles appear to extend into professional domains, enabling employees to enjoy the benefits of flexibility without sacrificing structure or interpersonal coordination of work.

Of course, these hybrid working practices should not be taken as a panacea. Without proactive intervention, existing inequalities in the labor market will not disappear in the wake of hybrid work. Moreover, and as highlighted by Robinson et al. (2021), there is a risk that these transformations could entrench or even exacerbate existing inequalities and introduce new vulnerabilities, particularly for those who—for various reasons—are unable or unwilling to share aspects of their private lives with colleagues in the name of visibility and (moral) coordination. This concern is especially relevant for people who already face structural vulnerabilities or are marginalized. Unlike, for instance, many of the working mothers we interviewed, who often found their domestic responsibilities and challenges recognized or mirrored by their colleagues, other groups may not be met with the same understanding. In some cases, rather than fostering inclusion into the work community, visibility could expose them to misrecognition or even discrimination.

Conclusion

This paper has explored the hybrid working practices and digital time-spaces emerging between home and work, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through our analysis, we have examined how hybrid working practices incorporate elements from both work and home, challenging ideological and spatiotemporal distinctions between these domains.

We developed four interrelated findings. First, hybrid work facilitates temporal redistribution, allowing greater prioritization of leisure, domestic responsibility, and caregiving during hours previously reserved for paid work. Second, digital platforms function as infrastructures for coordinating both moral expectations and the timing of activities, enabling hybrid workers to align activities across collective rhythms and spaces. Third, hybrid work reproduces temporal order through digital synchronization, as digital tools help manage individual routines and the need to maintain shared rhythms. Fourth, temporal visibility and reciprocity are central for sustaining the hybrid worker community, as digital visibility becomes a currency in mutual, moral coordination, requiring hybrid workers to share private information to enable coordination and access resources such as time, collegial care and recognition.

These findings indicate that the temporal reorganization of everyday life, which hybrid work implies, does not represent a collapse of collective rhythms, but rather a reconfiguration of shared rhythms and moralities - two aspects that Douglas emphasized as central to the maintenance of social order. As such, hybrid work is not just a matter of individual flexibility, but is also collectively negotiated within collective rhythms. Digital time-spaces may serve as a protective barrier against excessive individualization and feelings of isolation; digital tools provide platforms not only for logistical coordination, but also for negotiation of fairness, flexibility, and recognition across paid work, domestic responsibilities, care, and leisure. This may help explain why, despite drawbacks, many workers express a strong preference for hybrid arrangements as documented in numerous surveys, including those conducted by Fukumura et al. (2021) and DE (2022).

Ultimately, fostering socially sustainable hybrid work requires attention to the digital infrastructures and moral economies that support collective rhythm building. Our findings suggest that inclusive and caring digital time-spaces - mirroring the moral architecture of domestic coordination - can mitigate the isolating effects of remote work and enhance collective wellbeing among hybrid workers. However, while hybrid work empowers some workers, structural inequalities continue to shape access to visibility, flexibility and support. Our findings provide evidence of digitally mediated practices that hold promise of building collective rhythms under scattered work conditions, but these must be nurtured with awareness of the exclusions and vulnerabilities that they might also produce.