Remote work frequency shapes coping strategies and employee well-being in hybrid jobs

In one of the most comprehensive investigations of hybrid working conducted since the COVID-19 pandemic began to recede, researchers at an Italian university have found that the psychological engine driving employee well-being in hybrid workplaces is not how often people work from home, but how their jobs are designed and how they cope with what those jobs throw at them. The study, published in the journal Current Psychology, followed more than one thousand technical and administrative staff at a large university in northern Italy during the final phase of the pandemic, when remote work was no longer mandatory and a genuinely hybrid model had taken hold. Its central finding is striking: heavier workloads pushed employees toward avoidance coping, which raised anxiety and drained engagement, while clear roles pulled them toward active, problem-focused coping that did the opposite. The number of days spent working remotely—long assumed to be the decisive variable in debates over flexible work—did not moderate any of these effects.

The research team, led by Silvia Gilardi with colleagues Alice Fattori, Daniela Converso, and Barbara Loera, set out to resolve a puzzle that has lingered since hybrid work became the dominant arrangement for knowledge workers worldwide. Studies of remote work conducted before and during pandemic lockdowns produced wildly mixed results, with some reporting boosts to autonomy, saved commuting time, and engagement, and others documenting isolation, role ambiguity, blurred work-home boundaries, and mental distress. The authors argue that much of this confusion stems from treating remote work as an all-or-nothing practice and from subsuming hybrid work under the broader category of telework. An employee who works from home one day per week, they note, lives a fundamentally different social and professional reality from one who works from home four days per week, and previous research rarely accounted for that temporal dimension.

To disentangle these dynamics, the team built their study on two complementary theoretical pillars. The first is the Job Demands–Resources theory, a central framework in occupational health psychology, which distinguishes between job demands—features of work that require sustained physical or psychological effort, such as workload—and job resources, such as role clarity, that help employees achieve goals and buffer the impact of demands. The theory proposes a dual process: demands trigger a health-impairment pathway leading to strain and anxiety, while resources activate a motivational pathway leading to engagement and performance. The second pillar is the transactional theory of stress and coping, which holds that employees appraise their circumstances as more or less controllable and then select coping strategies accordingly. When a situation feels manageable, people tend toward approach coping—seeking information, planning, and actively solving problems. When it feels overwhelming, avoidance coping—denial, distraction, disengagement—takes over.

The researchers focused on two job characteristics in particular. Workload was chosen because it has repeatedly emerged as the key demand affecting well-being among remote workers across sectors, including administrative staff in academia, where the abrupt shift to digital service delivery during lockdowns forced employees to redesign processes without adequate training, producing job intensification. Role clarity, defined as the extent to which employees receive clear and precise information about their duties, goals, and responsibilities, was selected because alternating between office and home requires greater self-regulation, and a clear understanding of expectations can reduce the ambiguity inherent in coordinating with colleagues one rarely sees in person. Well-being was measured along two psychological dimensions: anxiety, captured with the brief GAD-2 screening scale, and work engagement, assessed with the ultra-brief three-item version of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale, covering vigor, dedication, and absorption.

Data collection took place between October and November 2021, during the fourth wave of the pandemic in Italy. By that point, the vast majority of the Italian population had completed initial vaccination, hospitalizations were contained, full remote work was no longer compulsory, and employees could choose whether to participate in the university’s hybrid arrangement—of which the maximum allowed was eight remote days per month. Out of 1,989 eligible employees, 1,002 completed the anonymous online questionnaire, a response rate of just over 50 percent. The sample was 69.3 percent female, mostly aged between 51 and 60, and overwhelmingly composed of administrative and technical-scientific staff. Crucially, the distribution of remote work habits was far from uniform: 27.1 percent of participants worked exclusively in the office, 11.4 percent worked remotely one or two days per month, 19.2 percent worked remotely three to five days, and 42.3 percent—by far the largest group—worked remotely six or more days per month.

The analytical strategy was rigorous. Before testing any hypotheses, the team validated their adapted version of the Coping Strategies Inventory using Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling, confirming a clean two-factor structure in which approach and avoidance coping emerged as statistically independent dimensions, with a latent correlation of essentially zero. The main hypotheses were then tested with the PROCESS macro using 5,000 bootstrap samples to estimate bias-corrected confidence intervals, modeling coping strategies as mediators between job characteristics and well-being outcomes, and remote work frequency as a potential moderator of both direct and indirect pathways. All models were adjusted for gender and for fear and risk perception related to SARS-CoV-2, a control that mattered given the ongoing pandemic context.

The results told a coherent story. Perceived workload functioned exactly as the health-impairment pathway predicted: employees facing heavier loads reported higher anxiety and lower engagement, and these effects ran substantially through coping. High workload increased the use of avoidance strategies—things like avoiding thinking about the problem or withdrawing socially—which in turn raised anxiety and sapped the positive, energized state of engagement. Role clarity worked in the opposite direction, activating a protective cascade: employees who understood what was expected of them used more approach coping, such as working directly on solving problems and reframing situations constructively, and less avoidance, and this pattern translated into lower anxiety and stronger engagement.

Then came the surprise. The researchers had hypothesized, on the basis of the “boost effect” in Job Demands–Resources theory, that role clarity would matter most for those working remotely most often, and that workload would be most damaging for intensive remote workers, who face additional coordination burdens, technological friction, social isolation, and blurred work-home boundaries. The data refused to cooperate. Remote work frequency did not significantly moderate the direct effects of workload and role clarity on well-being, nor did it moderate the indirect effects flowing through coping strategies. Whether an employee spent zero days or more than six days per month out of the office, the psychological architecture linking job demands, coping, and well-being remained essentially the same.

The authors interpret this null result as a genuinely important finding rather than a failure of theory. It suggests that in a mature hybrid context—one where employees have accumulated experience with remote practices and can choose their degree of participation—the design of the job itself, not the location or the frequency of remote work, is what drives mental health and motivation. Hybrid work, in this reading, is not an independent source of strain or benefit but an amplifier of whatever the underlying job conditions already are. A poorly designed job with excessive demands will harm employees whether they perform it at a desk on campus or at their kitchen table; a well-resourced job will sustain them in either setting.

The practical implications are pointed. If the frequency of remote work does not change the psychological dynamics, then blanket policies restricting or mandating remote days are unlikely to move the needle on employee well-being. Instead, the authors argue, organizations should integrate individual-level coping interventions—training that encourages approach strategies such as problem-solving and cognitive reframing—with structural job redesign that reduces workload and sharpens role clarity for all employees, regardless of where they sit. Monitoring remote work intensity remains worthwhile, the European Working Conditions Survey data showing that intensive hybrid workers tend to log longer hours and work into their free time, but it should not be treated as the lever that determines psychological outcomes.

The study also fills a gap in a context that researchers say deserves more attention: the public sector, and higher education in particular, where hybrid arrangements spread rapidly in organizations with no prior tradition of flexible work. Italian universities adopted remote work abruptly in March 2020 under lockdown mandates and then retained hybrid models after three successive lockdowns, making them a natural laboratory for observing how hybrid dynamics play out when they are imposed quickly rather than cultivated over years. By studying this population at the moment when remote work became voluntary, the researchers captured hybrid work in something close to its steady state.

Limitations remain, as with any self-report, cross-sectional study conducted in a single institution during an ongoing pandemic, and the authors acknowledge that causal directions cannot be definitively established from correlational data. Yet the sample size, the response rate, the methodological care in validating the coping measures, and the careful adjustment for pandemic-related fear and risk perception all strengthen confidence in the central conclusion. As organizations worldwide continue to fight over return-to-office mandates, this research offers a reframing: the question that matters most may not be where employees work, but whether their workload is sustainable and their role is clear—because those are the forces, the data suggest, that actually decide whether hybrid workers thrive or buckle under the strain.