A perfect storm: How digital transformation,changing office spaces and the blurring of work and non-work lives are driving the individualisation of social workers’ practice in England

Abstract

Child and family social workers’ practice has been transformed by the shift to digitally enabled hybrid working since the COVID19 pandemic. In this article, we use the analytical frame of sociomateriality to examine how digital technologies and material spaces in social workers’ homes and offices are shaping social workers’ communication and working relationships, and how hybrid working is blurring social workers’ work and non-work lives. This article analyses data from an ethnographic study of hybrid working in child and family social work services in three local authorities in England between 2020 and 2022. The article argues that the ways digitally enabled hybrid working has been implemented are driving the individualisation of social workers’ practice, meaning social workers are largely working separately from their colleagues and managers, whether at home or in offices, are working in highly differentiated ways without appreciation of differences in practice and their implications, and are carrying increasingly high levels of individual responsibility for their work. The article argues these changes have led to thinner, more transient interactions between social workers and managers, have left social workers more isolated from each other and have introduced unacknowledged complexity into practitioners’ work more generally and their communication with colleagues and people using social work services in particular.

This article presents findings from an ethnographic study of digitally enabled, hybrid working approaches in child and family social work that took place in England between late 2020 and late 2022. During this period social workers moved from working mostly at home, because of restrictions on work in offices that were implemented at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, to a hybrid working model. Hybrid working is a form of flexible working where employees work partly in employers’ workplaces and partly elsewhere, particularly their own homes (McCartney, 2025; Office for National Statistics, 2022). As in many countries, hybrid working increased in the UK towards the end of the COVID-19 pandemic and has continued to do so since, with around 28% of working adults now working this way (Office for National Statistics, 2025). Since 2024, UK employees have been able to request to work flexibly at the start of their employment, including working a hybrid model (CIPD, 2024) and, in many areas of employment including public sector social work, hybrid working is now the norm (Office for National Statistics, 2025; Pulman and Fenge, 2024).

As we discuss in this article, the study found that the development of hybrid working after the initial lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic entailed a perfect storm of conditions that intensified the individualisation of practice. By individualisation, we mean social workers working separately from each other, carrying greater individual responsibility for their work and practising in divergent ways with limited appreciation of the implications of these differences. We found that hybrid working has led all practitioners to work in more individualised ways, influencing encounters and relationships with colleagues and families using services, and practitioners’ experiences of their work and non-work lives. The conditions driving this were the proliferation of digitally enabled practices available to social workers, the blurring of social workers’ work and non-work lives and the reorientation of office spaces in ways that established social work practice as mostly individual work.

We use the theoretical frame of sociomateriality to examine the relational, material and spatial qualities of hybrid working for practitioners. Sociomateriality first developed in organisation studies in the early 2000s as a theory to understand the relationships between people and digital technologies in contemporary organisations. These technologies are mostly understood in social work organisations as tools available to practitioners, which influence practice in different ways depending on how effectively they work and their unintended consequences (see e.g. Shafiq, 2020; Turner, 2020). Sociomateriality, in contrast, draws attention to how digital technologies and other material and human agents are entangled in networks of relationships that cannot be separated out and that co-create each other. Like people, digital agents are understood as social, in that they interact with and influence others, and as material, in that they consist of material objects and networks arranged across physical space. Human-digital entanglements develop because people and digital technologies are imbricated with each other in organisations — i.e. they are layered together in time and space. Working practices operate through organisational structures in which digital technologies are already embedded and have influenced practices over time, and these organisational structures influence how people and digital technologies encounter each other and are distributed across spaces. Such features lead human and digital agents to be implicated in each other’s activities and interdependent on each other, while also interacting dynamically. People exercise some choices about whether and how to engage with technologies, and these freedoms have increased in many ways with the digital transformation of work over the last two decades, but they are also limited by pre-existing networks. Technologies themselves are also designed to accommodate some flexibility in how people interact with them and can be recoded and redesigned within certain parameters, as requirements change. These kinds of sociomaterial relations result in entanglements that are both relatively durable (they cannot be easily reimagined or avoided by individual agents) and flexible (they can accommodate degrees of change and individual agency that previous arrangements might not have done).

Sociomaterial writers draw on other theoretical frames for understanding interactions between humans and technologies such as actor-network theory (e.g. see Orlikowski, 2007) but they differ in certain key respects. For example, in contrast to actor-network theory, sociomaterial writers approach people and digital technologies as distinct phenomena because of their different roles in interactions. While they both exercise agency, human agents can make decisions about whether to engage with digital agents and whether to adapt them in ways that are qualitatively different from the ways digital technologies influence people, and this is a product of the organisational structures in which people and digital technologies interact (Leonardi, 2011; Orlikowski, 2007). This structurational orientation of sociomateriality is particularly useful for our study, given its focus on human-digital interactions as they have occurred in organisational contexts that are shifting because of digital transformation and compounded austerity in public sector services. Another key aspect of a great deal of sociomaterial writing is its attention to affordances (e.g. Fayard and Weeks, 2014; Leonardi, 2011). Affordance theory was first developed to describe how humans and other organisms experience objects, not through visual representation but directly, through organisms’ perceptions of the possibilities objects afford for embodied interaction (Gibson, 1979). A bird, for example, perceives the roof of a building in terms of the possibilities it offers for landing and perching on. In design theory, affordances have been understood as features of objects that can be intuitively read, because of the qualities of human bodies and capacities: for example, knobs invite turning because their forms interact with the qualities of human hands in particular ways (Norman, 1988). More recent writing has tended to approach affordances as features of the interaction between humans and objects, influenced by human inclinations and experiences and the forms and potential uses of objects (Davis, 2020; Kiverstein, 2024). Affordance theory and sociomateriality are used together in this article to understand the appeal and utility of certain human-digital, material interactions.

Some research on electronic information systems in social work has engaged with sociomateriality to show how these technologies have shaped social workers’ practices and decision making (e.g. Eubanks, 2017; Gillingham, 2013, 2016). As a wider range of digital technology has become more embedded in social work practice, research has started to examine how it has been used, with increasing attention to smartphones and social media from the mid 2010s onwards (Byrne and Kirwan, 2019; Ryan and Garrett, 2018) and video calls and videoconferencing platforms, after these technologies began to be widely used at start of the COVID-19 pandemic (Baginsky and Manthorpe, 2021). While these studies have considered the effects of digital technologies on communication and relationships, they have tended to focus on practitioners’ decision making about which digital media to use, depending on the particular requirements of their communication, so have tended not to consider the agency of digital technologies in these processes (Behan-Devlin, 2024). Jeyasingham’s (2020) study of children’s safeguarding social workers’ practice before the COVID-19 pandemic drew on sociomaterial theory to examine how social workers’ engagements with digital devices influenced the form of both remote and face-to-face communication in practice. Writing about socially distanced relations between social workers and families during the pandemic, Pink et al. (2022, p.420) have argued that social work is always a hybrid of human and digital material elements:

[T]he digital is integral to how our everyday environments and social relations emerge and change. Social work practice likewise, in using digital technologies and media, is always constituted as a digital materiality.

With this article, we seek to build on these analyses, examining the forms of hybrid working that have become normative since the end of COVID-19 social distancing requirements.

Methodology

The research aimed to identify the agency approaches and individual practices, experiences and meanings associated with digitally enabled hybrid working in three local authorities, referred to in this article as Easton, Westville and Southland. These authorities were chosen because of their locations in different regions of England and their differences in terms of geographical size and urban/rural mix (Easton and Westville cover small urban areas while Southland covers a larger, mixed rural-urban area). The study was therefore able to examine approaches used in different parts of the country, and the significance of different geographical and spatial conditions for practices. The study used a short-term ethnographic approach, drawing on Pink and Morgan’s (2013) discussion of approaches to ethnography more typical in settings such health and welfare, where ethnographic work might have a more defined focus and occur over a shorter period than in traditional anthropological research. Pink and Morgan (2013: 352) describe short-term ethnography as

intense excursions into [people’s] lives, which use more interventional as well as observational methods to create contexts through which to delve into questions that will reveal what matters to those people in the context of what the researcher is seeking to find out.

This approach to ethnography enabled us to generate more focused data, particularly about social workers’ practices and experiences. We recruited as participants 21 practitioners and team managers in Children’s Safeguarding Services across the three sites, selected to reflect a range of levels of experience and roles. We interviewed each participant regularly over six to 12 months, exploring their practices, interactions with colleagues and families who used services, interactions between their work and non-work lives, and how these matters changed over time. We asked them to keep diaries of their interactions with digital technologies and to demonstrate how they used them during these interviews. We conducted 136 interviews in total with these practitioners. We observed the practice of a sub-group of 10 of these participants, observing with each participant two to four examples of certain key practice meetings (planning and review meetings with families and other professionals, legal planning meetings and supervision sessions). Afterwards, we conducted interviews with people who had taken part in these meetings to explore their views and experiences of what had occurred. All these interviews and observations occurred online via Zoom or Microsoft Teams, because of social distancing requirements affecting our practice as researchers at this time. The practice meetings themselves were mostly online or hybrid meetings, which we observed via the videoconferencing platforms being used by participants. We also observed a small number of entirely face-to-face meetings via Zoom or Teams on participants’ laptops, positioned so that we could see and hear all those taking part. These approaches allowed us to develop detailed understandings of different practitioners’ approaches to and experiences of hybrid working. In addition, we interviewed 11 people in senior management and leadership positions in children’s safeguarding services and Information Technology and Estates departments in the three local authorities, in order to understand the organisational contexts of practitioners’ work.

In late 2022, after social distancing measures had ended in England, we conducted observations and interviewed a small number of managers and practitioners in each authority face-to-face. These all occurred in social work offices, focusing on changes to how offices were configured and used, social workers’ and managers’ practices in these new spaces, and their views about working arrangements. We also held two face-to-face focus groups: one group with six parents who had had child protection involvement and the other with 11 care-experienced young people. The discussions in these groups focused primarily on how digital technologies had influenced communication and relationships with social workers.

The first and second authors used NVivo to code data relevant to our research questions, identifying practices and experiences of digitally enabled hybrid working and their implications for relationships and sense-making. The first article from this study explored how more experienced practitioners had gained increased autonomy from hybrid working while less experienced practitioners were under more stress and had more constraints on their work (Jeyasingham and Devlin, 2024). For the current article, we analysed the coded data to identify changes in practices and experiences evident across most or all practitioners. We identified pervasive material practices in hybrid work — work on mobile devices such as phones, home-based work and office work — and developed sociomaterial analyses of these practices.

We sought to develop a reflexive approach to our analysis, examining our own perspectives and underlying beliefs as researchers, social work practitioners and educators, and the influences of these experiences on our interpretations of the data. We identified the impacts of videoconferencing and working at a distance from other practitioners as key themes and so it was important for us to reflect on the significance of our own use and experience of videoconferencing and remote working during data generation (see Jeyasingham and Devlin, 2024, for a more detailed discussion of this issue). This approach to ethnography allowed us to develop deep insights into emerging sociomaterial entanglements in practice and their effects on working relationships, sensemaking and experiences. While we had selected sites before the pandemic with a view to developing ethnographies of places with different degrees of engagement with digital technology, we identified instead a more nuanced picture, where social workers’ practices in all authorities were deeply entangled with digital technologies and practitioners carried high levels of individual responsibility. We identified some findings particular to each site, depending on factors such as the specific responses to the shift to remote working in each authority, geographical matters such as travel times and rurality, and characteristics of the office spaces in each authority, which were all being reconfigured in different ways. In the findings, we identify some issues specific to certain sites, while identifying examples of other practices that were relevant across all three sites.

The study conforms to the British Sociological Association’s (2017) guidelines on ethical research. It was granted ethical approval from the University of Manchester Research Ethics Committee 5 in June 2020 (decision reference 2020-9399-15825). All participants gave informed consent to take part. We present data in pseudonymised form in this article, choosing pseudonyms for the local authorities and participants that are not related to their actual names or locations. We have not altered details about participants’ genders or practitioners’ roles and levels of experience, given these were often significant for their experiences of hybrid working. To ensure anonymity, we have used a digital application, Clip2Comic, to render photographic images as animations and have blurred out small instances of text in the images where they might lead places to be identifiable. The study was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ref.: ES/T001097/1).

Findings

The following findings arose from our analysis of the research data. We found data for almost all participants showing the proliferation of digitally enabled practices and the blurring of practitioners’ work and non-work lives. Data generated towards the end of this period, when practitioners were spending more time in offices and offices themselves were becoming more frequently used, provided evidence of the third finding, that new forms of individualised practice were occurring in offices.

Proliferation of digitally enabled practices

The shift to digitally enabled practice at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic allowed practitioners to exercise greater autonomy over how they worked, with a consequent proliferation of ways of working with different devices and communication media, with limited acknowledgement of the implications of these new practices. At the beginning of the pandemic, institutional changes occurred in all three authorities, such as the provision of laptops and smartphones to practitioners and the adoption of videoconferencing platforms. While these changes were implemented across large sections of the workforce, individual practitioners were deciding how to engage with digital technologies in their own homes at a distance from each other and, often, in the absence of institutional direction. Consequently, technologies were used in diverse ways without practitioners always appreciating the range of practices that had started to occur. We illustrate this proliferation with examples of social workers’ practices with just one digital device, the smartphone, which influenced practice in multiple ways.

The influence of smartphones on relationships between practitioners and families

Smartphones were central to practitioners’ communication in all three authorities. Research before the pandemic identified phones being used to text families, check email and tether to mobile computers for remote work on information systems, influencing the pace of practice and the qualities of working relationships (Byrne and Kirwan, 2019; Jeyasingham, 2020; Ryan and Garrett, 2018). These uses continued but phones also started to be used in other ways. Some participants had used the social media application WhatsApp before COVID-19 to send messages to colleagues about non-work matters. From the start of the pandemic onwards, practitioners began to use WhatsApp for video calls and messages to service users. Many participants explained that WhatsApp made it simple to make video calls to families because they commonly already used the app. Some practitioners preferred to send families WhatsApp messages rather than cellular SMS texts because they perceived WhatsApp to be cost-free (the app is free to use if you have a suitable phone and wi-fi connection, while replying to cellular SMS texts can entail charges). Jenny Davis (2020) has explored how affordances such as these introduce new affective relations to communication: they do not simply enable or prevent actions, they also encourage, discourage and demand action and, in so doing, they introduce affective experiences such as delight and distaste. For example:

Technological objects encourage some line of action when that line of action is made easy and appealing. The action is generally obvious, expected, and seamless to execute. Users need to employ little or no creativity, deviance, or subterfuge to engage the technology in encouraged ways. (Davis, 2020: 72).

Davis gives the example of Facebook, where the app’s affordances encourage users to make connections and interact with their networks. WhatsApp encourages its own forms of communication: it is an instant messaging service with alerts to draw users’ attention as soon as a message is sent. Users value the app’s immediacy, how it enables reciprocal communication, more casual interactions and more emotional expressivity than other text-based communication platforms (Pang and Woo, 2020). Our study suggested similar affordances that distinguished WhatsApp from asynchronous and more formal text-based communication used by social workers, such as email. For example, Jack, a recently qualified social worker, identified numerous ways Whatsapp enabled and encouraged new communication forms, connected to its ease of use, informality and less intrusive feel, as well as some potentially unpleasant elements:

I text a mum using WhatsApp, but I like using that in work. It helps, being that you can see if they’ve read it and often it’s less formal, which helps. It’s always a bit awkward when they put kisses on the end, especially as a male worker, I’m just sick of it, it’s a bit awkward. I just ignore it. But, no, it’s easier than calls.

WhatsApp’s immediacy, combined with different norms of emotional expression in WhatsApp use, introduced new dilemmas and new qualities of written communication between some social workers and service users. Maggie, another recently qualified social worker, explained how she negotiated one of WhatsApp’s affordances, emojis, in some messages to parents:

It has to be specific things like, for example, with this lady, she was really sad, so I messaged her and then I put, like, you know, the love heart emoji – the white one not the red one, because that’s a bit weird. So I did that. Also, I remember sending her emojis when she gave birth as well, it was like little congratulation emojis because I did the pre-birth assessment on her as well. I’ll send laughing emojis to [another parent] because she always sends me lots of little Xs and that kind of stuff. It’s not with everyone.

In these ways, social workers’ engagements with Whatsapp produced new forms of communication between social workers and families and new experiences of these interactions. At the same time, these engagements—what would be understood as entanglements in sociomaterial terms—were occurring in the context of the same organisational structures and professional roles that existed before WhatsApp’s influence on social work-parent interactions, placing limits on their flexibility and creating some jarring effects, particularly for less experienced practitioners.

Social workers’ increasing use of text messages to communicate with parents and young people, particularly WhatsApp, had diverse impacts on people using services. Some parents and young people in the focus groups explained that WhatsApp enabled them to stay in touch with practitioners and keep communication open when they were unable to make or receive phone calls. Others told us of situations where they had received unclear and alarming information by text, or suspected practitioners had used WhatsApp messages rather than phone calls to fulfil requirements to attempt contact, without providing young people with opportunities to discuss their wellbeing in any depth.

Hybrid meeting arrangements were sometimes used to allow two parents who were in conflict to attend the same meeting without being in the same space, with consequences for the kinds of interactions and relationships open to different participants. Rob, whose child had been subject to a child protection plan, explained how he was expected to participate via phone calls in child protection conferences that his child’s mother attended in person. He described the impacts of this practice:

You don’t get an option to contribute because you’re not in the room. All you can do is answer yes or no, you’re just a voice out of a speaker. If you’re sat in silence, as a participant in a meeting, if you’re in the room you can make people aware of how it’s affecting you, your emotional state. You can’t do that as a voice.

This initial interaction set a pattern for how he was contacted by practitioners subsequently:

The professionals in the room who you’ve corresponded with naturally, maybe not consciously, continue to communicate with you in that way. You’ll get an email or a phone call as opposed to a meeting whereas the other [parent], they’ll say ‘I’ll come and meet you and we’ll have a coffee and we’ll do this’. So already, your relationship with people you need to speak to—you’ve become the man at the end of a phone number.

Examples such as this reflected how human-digital entanglements reproduced existing structures of engagement and exclusion through the imbrication of people and technologies across time and space. The arrangement that rendered Rob as a ‘voice out of a speaker’ during the meeting was plausibly the outcome of long-standing gendered practices in child protection practice, where fathers have not participated in meaningful ways (Maxwell et al., 2012). This effect was reinforced through the layering of other human-digital entanglements that mediated communication between Rob and the professional group. In these and other ways, we found phones, apps and other digital agents were structuring affective experiences, interactions and relationships between practitioners, young people and families.

Smartphones and social workers’ engagements with online meetings

We found smartphones were used by practitioners in diverse ways during online meetings that increased practitioners’ convenience and flexibility but also sometimes instituted new forms of separation from work and other practitioners. Figure 1 shows how Carl, a senior practitioner, used his phone to access online meetings when working at home. The image has been adapted from a screenshot, taken with Carl’s permission during an online interview, while he showed how he positioned his devices. He tended to work in his living room, connecting his TV screen (the larger screen in this image) to his laptop to view the information system or emails and using his phone, propped up under the TV, for the online meeting. Carl described using this arrangement to view records that were related to the content of the meeting. However, interviews with other practitioners and observations of online meetings also showed it was quite usual for practitioners to work on unrelated records or messages during meetings. Such arrangements had the effect of minimising attention to the images of other people and orienting social workers to records. We observed some meetings where participants were working on documents while highly engaged in the conversations taking place (for example, while chairing and minuting a meeting) but others where participants were reading or typing while apparently unengaged with the meetings they were attending. The pull of engaging in digital administrative work during meetings reflected the effects of longer-standing human-digital imbrications, such as the use of information systems and email for communication between practitioners and managers (Jeyasingham, 2020), which led to significant increases in text-based communication when social workers started to use collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams, further increasing social workers’ digital administrative burden.

Figure 1.

Using a phone and TV to participate in an online meeting.

Phones enabled new kinds of mobile practice. As well as making phone calls while driving (a long-standing practice for many participants) practitioners also described using phones to draft case notes while stuck in traffic, participate in online meetings while driving (a practice we noted early in the pandemic that became less evident later in the project) and work while parked up between visits. Work in parked cars was particularly prevalent in Southland, where travel times to some parts of the borough were long and the periods between visits might be too short to return to the office but long enough to do work. This could involve reviewing emails on phones, tethering phones to tablet computers for more substantive recording and participating in online meetings. Figure 2 is from a photo taken by Niamh, an experienced social worker, showing how she positioned her phone on the car’s steering wheel to access a Teams meeting while parked in a rural location between home visits. We observed other social workers using similar approaches to participate in meetings while in cars, and this practice showed how phones facilitated new forms of convenience and mobility while also increasing the complexity of child protection work, with social workers attempting to ensure seclusion and privacy while dealing with the distractions of noise, heat and cold (for a critical discussion of child protection social work mobilities before COVID-19, see Disney et al., 2019).

Figure 2.

Using a phone to participate in an online meeting.

These examples show how the proliferation of digital-human working practices, which participants mostly did not acknowledge or treated as insignificant, was enabled by social workers working routinely separately from each other and by design features of the digital devices and applications they used, which provoked changes to the quality and affective appeal of their communication and relationships.

Blurring of work and non-work lives

We identified two aspects of hybrid working that led to the blurring of practitioners’ work and non-work lives. Firstly, practitioners had to negotiate new sets of social and material relations in their own domestic spaces, which influenced their experiences of work and affected how they were able to present themselves as effective professionals or establish the experience of a shared presence in online interactions with parents and young people (Kolehmainen and Lupton, 2025). Participants negotiated the complexities this entailed in different ways: some felt it was important to make the material spaces around them visible during online meetings and so had to manage these spaces to promote desired ambiences. They described choosing attractive, relatively anonymous pictures or ornaments that would support rather than detract from the work they wanted to do during online meetings. Others set up separate workspaces in their homes, used blurred backgrounds or virtual backgrounds so that they could keep their homes out of view but, even in these circumstances, aspects of participants’ home environments intruded into their work. For example, noise from other people in the house, parcel deliveries, problems with devices and connectivity all disrupted work, and participants described feelings of embarrassment, frustration or ambivalence about this. They were often highly conscious that they could not fully control the variables shaping how they appeared in online meetings while at home. Robby Nadler (2020) has discussed how the flattened images presented in online meetings, comprising people themselves and their surroundings, function together as ‘third skins’ that stand as signifiers for people much as clothes (our ‘second skins’) might function in face-to-face interactions. Our study showed how participants were having to negotiate these conditions, considering how to present themselves as effective, caring and responsive without the institutional paraphernalia and embodied presence of in-person interactions in offices and families’ homes. Some practitioners drew on aspects of their home spaces in their work, others tried to avoid this but still found domestic and individual concerns impacted their work at times. Frequently, this led to a subtle shift away from formal and institutional towards domestic and personal atmospheres in their work.

Secondly, for most practitioners, home working involved frequent interruptions during office hours but also offered the opportunity to work more easily outside these times, which meant many practitioners chose to work during evenings and weekends. Participants often described this flexibility in positive terms, enabling them to work more easily while managing non-work responsibilities. For example, Kim, a team manager, explained how she balanced work with caring for her son:

I’ll log off, spend time with my son and then log back on when he’s gone to bed, then I might do an hour. I find it easier at night-time when you’re not as available and don’t have them distractions, like people can’t just call you in the middle of something.

Several participants described periods of intense, solitary work along with less busy time when they were able to combine work with domestic or leisure activities, for pleasure rather than efficiency. Carl worked a part-time contract with some untimetabled hours. He often worked at weekends, writing reports that required sustained concentration, while he sometimes combined home working during office hours with spending time with his child. Emma, a manager, often combined routine work on the information system with watching TV in her living room (Figure 3 is from a photo taken by Emma to show how she worked this way). Working at home led work to be sometimes juxtaposed with, sometimes integrated into non-work life and, in this way, it often developed a more domestic or leisurely feel.

Figure 3.

Combining routine information work with leisure activities.

It was not always possible to balance work and non-work demands. Some participants found work subsumed their non-work lives because they lived alone and lacked cues from others to stop working, they shared their homes with other people and had nowhere to work except their bedrooms, or they simply had too much urgent work to complete. Some practitioners experienced greater personal responsibility for their work even when they had frequent contact with managers and ended up working more autonomously without choosing to do so. Laverne, a senior practitioner, explained how working at home had changed her experience of informal supervision with her manager:

I guess I’m just on the phone all the time, if I need to be. So that’s quite different to before COVID — we would just see [managers] in the office, but now it’s just phone calls all through the day, type of thing, and that’s just, you know, asking little questions about this or that, informal stuff, in terms of check-ins and things. It’s not as nice at all, because there’s definitely been times when I’ve called, crying, and she [Laverne’s manager] — I sort of have to say ‘I’m crying’. Or there’s been a time when I cried, I had a really difficult phone call with a parent, and it was at the end of the week and I was really tired, and if I’d been in the office I would have just had people around me then, but I was at home and I just basically was, like, ‘Well, I could call her now and just explain what’s happened and talk it through’ but I just couldn’t be bothered, so I didn’t. It was a bit of a crap way to end the week.

Phone calls between practitioners and managers are not a recent introduction to social work but these interactions took a more prominent role than they had before the rise of hybrid working, and were experienced differently when practitioners had much less in-person interaction with colleagues than they once would have done.

Individualisation of work in offices

The proliferation of working practices, blurring of work and non-work and increasing personal responsibility held by practitioners that developed when practitioners had been home-based continued as practitioners began to work regularly in office spaces. As we go on to discuss, practitioners continued to communicate remotely, digital devices and networks continued to shape their work, and office spaces themselves had been reconfigured in ways that promoted more individualised practice.

Office spaces in all three participating local authorities changed significantly between March 2020 and late 2022, partly because hybrid working was seen to require different kinds of workspaces from those that previously existed but also because local authorities were facing increased costs and reduced incomes, and using office spaces differently was identified as an effective way to reduce expenditure. In Eastport, two buildings that had accommodated children’s social work teams were earmarked for closure and, at the time of this study, all social workers were being relocated to a third building, shared with other council departments. In Southland, most social workers continued to be located in the same building as before the pandemic but this now accommodated twice as many staff and various other departments, following the closure and repurposing of other council buildings. In Westville, social workers returned to a separate, smaller office space in the same building they had used before COVID-19. The new office spaces in all three authorities were qualitatively different from those that had existed in March 2020. Most floor space was given over to collaborative work with reductions in individual workstations. This reflected a different model of office working from the past, as Carolyn, who led the department dealing with changes to office spaces in Southland Council, explained:

If you’ve got a discrete piece of work to do and you need to concentrate and get your head down, then going into an office building is probably not the place to do that piece of work. What an office building is, for the future, is a place where you meet others and you collaborate together to get your piece of work done.

Carolyn explained this shift to ‘collaborative workspaces’ was ‘very much [about] project working, sitting around tables, meeting together and collaborating to get your work done’. Some of these spaces in each authority were private meeting rooms but most were located in wider office spaces, furnished in different ways to afford varied degrees of privacy, openness and comfort and enable conversations between different sized groups (see Figures 4 and 5). The emphasis was on face-to-face interactions in more and less informal, leisure-like spaces. In Eastport these included sofas, small groups of chairs around cafe tables and larger groups of chairs around meeting tables. Spaces were labelled with ceiling signs indicating more flexible uses, e.g. ‘FLEXIBLE MEETING SPACE’ and ‘WORKING LUNCH ZONE’. In Westville, the tone shift was less dramatic (low chairs were not in evidence, there was less of a leisure aesthetic than in the other two offices) perhaps because this office was reserved for social workers. Even so, the space included the same small and larger seating arrangements grouped for collaborative work, with fewer individual workstations than before the refurbishment. In all three authorities, office spaces had been reconfigured according to the same principles: office work was collaborative work, individual work should be separated from collaborative work and done individually at home.

Figure 4.

Collaborative workspaces providing different degrees of openness and acoustic control (Southland office).

Figure 5.

Space for hybrid discussions with acoustic panels (Southland office).

The collaborative working zones in Eastport were not yet in operation during the research project’s fieldwork but the offices in the other authorities were in full use. In Westville, social workers told us the space got extremely noisy, overwhelmingly so at times. In Southland, some social workers were coming into the office most days but daily attendance rates across different departments averaged less than 20% at this time, in a building that could accommodate at any one time 50% of the workers based there, so noise and lack of space were not identified as issues. Instead, problems arose relating to the impacts of social workers’ collaborative work on other workers and the capacity of open office spaces to enable collegial support and ensure data security.

Before the start of the pandemic, social workers in Southland had been based in their own section of the building. After the redesign, this area no longer existed so groups of social workers used open workspaces, doing work on computers and phones in clusters and chatting intermittently, as they had done when they had had a separate office. Given much of their talk concerned child abuse, it started to be noticed by others in the building. Sian, a project manager in the team responsible for enabling the shift towards collaborative workspaces at Southland, explained:

A few of my colleagues have overheard conversations where a social worker has been on a call, having a conversation that's probably something that should have been done in private, in an open plan area. And that makes that person feel quite uncomfortable during their day-to-day work because they're not used to that.

This raised dilemmas for social workers, because so much of their work concerned traumatic subject matter that they wanted to be able to discuss if needed. As Anthony, a senior manager in Children’s Safeguarding, explained:

I think people are lowering their voice and they’re taking calls away, but I was talking to a team yesterday and you don’t have the luxury sometimes. If a section 47 [child protection investigation] is undertaken, I might be checking what’s going on with that, and then someone sitting over there could say ‘Oh yeah, I went out on that visit yesterday and there was [drug-use] paraphernalia around the house’ [etc]. I can’t say ‘Stop that conversation, let’s go somewhere private.’ Every single conversation we’re having is about risk to children, we can’t not talk in the office, it would be impossible.

This pointed to a key difference between social workers’ views about how data needed to be managed and the views of those managing the office reconfiguration. Social workers valued previous arrangements that had allowed them to discuss sensitive data openly and flexibly in a secure and separate space. The view informing the redesign was that confidential information needed to be located away from collaborative spaces. As Sian explained:

We’re trying to build spaces where confidentiality is key and it’s not just social care workers that need to be private as well, so you need to provide it for everyone. I think social workers tend to forget that. They tend to think that their roles are the most different and more important than other people because of the conversations they’re having but, actually, someone’s meeting may just be as important, it’s just on a different topic, so we need to provide those facilities for everyone.

The solution had been to design individual working spaces, which social workers could use to take phone calls and engage in online meetings (see Figure 6). These were located separately from the building’s collaborative spaces and furnished with acoustic panels to dampen sound, making it easier for users not to be distracted by each other’s conversation. The booths offered workers space that was notionally private: they did not stop confidential information spoken during phone calls being overheard by other employees, but they made the sounds less intrusive. These kinds of material changes to office spaces invited more individualised forms of practice in the office, while also presenting home working as the default location for individual work.

Figure 6.

Individual working spaces (Southland office).

Discussion

In this article, we have examined how social workers’ engagements with digital technologies, the changing relationships between social workers’ work and non-work lives and the transformations of office spaces triggered by intense financial pressures on public sector employers have created a perfect storm that has transformed social work, with practitioners more often working separately and holding high levels of individual responsibility for their work. Social workers have become more isolated from each other, their interactions with managers and people using services have changed radically, often becoming more convenient but also thinner, more transient, and subject to unacknowledged complexity. Social workers have sometimes found creative ways to communicate using digital technologies but these technologies remain active agents in interactions, recasting the kinds of relationships and experiences that are possible. Social workers’ work and non-work lives have become more entwined and, while most social workers have begun to work in offices again, these spaces have changed substantively, in ways that invite further individualised practices and increase social workers’ isolation and individual responsibility.

The analytical frame for this study has been sociomateriality, which has so far only influenced a narrow range of social work research on information systems. As our analysis in this article demonstrates, sociomateriality helps make sense of the superficially contradictory processes of change and continuity involved in hybrid working, instituted through the proliferation of new technologies. A sociomaterial understanding of people and digital technologies as imbricated through organisational networks enables a nuanced examination of how some practices involving technology are relatively durable whilst others are more flexible. We have used this frame to draw out the particularities of social workers’ engagements with technology while outlining where these relate to less flexible aspects of human-digital entanglement across the research sites. Critics of sociomateriality have suggested that it does not adequately account for structural power (e.g. Mutch, 2013). However, our approach, which acknowledges both the different qualities of human and digital agents in entanglements and the influence of wider factors such as austerity and gender in sustaining some forms of human-digital entanglement, accounts for this while highlighting more flexible or unanticipated practice shifts. We suggest that sociomateriality is particularly useful for future social work research because it is not prescriptive about what are considered agents in sociomaterial relations, and this allows for the generation of analysis that is likely to have portability across different types of technology and social work organisation.

Some recent literature has identified how hybrid working can enable practitioners to feel more in control of their work, mitigating the isolation from colleagues experienced when most practitioners worked entirely from home at the start of COVID-19 (Kinman and Grant, 2022). Other studies have raised questions about the quality of practice and the wellbeing of practitioners in contexts where they are more distant from each other (Daley, 2023) and highlighted the tensions inherent in remote and hybrid working (Ahmad, 2024). More widely, the UK literature about hybrid working highlights the advantages in terms of increased accessibility and convenience but acknowledges that hybrid working may have a negative impact on collaboration within teams and present challenges in managing wellbeing (CIPD, 2023). This study’s findings suggest caution about the ways flexibility has so far been operationalised in child and family social work in England, where greater freedom for practitioners may be linked to more divergent practices and fewer opportunities to learn from and be challenged by colleagues, with particular risks for less experienced practitioners (Jeyasingham and Devlin, 2024). Research conducted before the pandemic has suggested that large, open-plan offices may be associated with more individualised practice and fewer opportunities for sensemaking with colleagues (Ferguson et al., 2020; Jeyasingham, 2016). This study suggests office design is just one element of a broader set of changes to public sector social work in England that have established practice as a primarily individual activity.

While there is a lack of published academic research findings about UK children’s social workers’ practice with digital technology based on more recent data than our study, the practice evidence and discussions show that hybrid working continues to be normative in public sector social work (British Association of Social Workers, 2024; Hannah and Major, 2025). One of us has conducted more recent research on children’s social workers’ engagements with digital technology, which reveals similar sociomaterial engagements (Behan-Devlin, 2025). Research in other social work fields has identified the problematic impacts of changes to offices and increasing remote working. For example, Pulman and Fenge’s (2024) research with social workers in adult social care services has identified how contemporary offices lack privacy and suitable places to debrief, while the shift to hybrid working ‘prevents development of team identity and informal peer support, particularly for newly qualified workers’ (p.3763).

Our study raises questions requiring further research about the impact of digital engagement on communication between social workers and young people and families using services. While the study has generated rich data about social workers’ everyday practices and experiences, further ethnographic research with more in-person observation is needed to understand the implications of the normalisation of hybrid working.