The hybrid office

Working from home and hybrid office working has become an increasingly prominent feature of Covid-19 era organisational functioning. While it represented a short-term pandemic crisis response, its emergence as an evident longer-term transformation in organisational operations poses a range of accounting and management issues. 

This study examines the productivity, cost management and management control dimensions of the emerging transition to hybrid office working. It undertakes this through the analysis of recent business and professional practice-oriented discourse on hybrid office developments, and theoretically informed by concepts drawn from the organisational resilience literature. 

The paper makes three central contributions:

1. it finds that immediate short-term defensive crisis responses are being followed by longer-term productivity oriented transformational strategies aimed at embracing new opportunities; 
2. cost incurrence is identified as a key strategy for building longer term office working infrastructure, communication and collaboration processes; and 
3. pre and post covid approaches to management control are identified as complex and potentially conflicting as both management and staff negotiate expectations and processes more relevant to the changed hybrid working environment.

Presenters: Professor Lee Parker (Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow)

Host: Professor Shamima Haque

You can join us in person or join us on Teams.

Click here to join the meeting