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One of the more striking aspects of the study is what it does not find. In much of the public discussion surrounding flexible work, gender has occupied a central place, with commentators often assuming that women, bearing a disproportionate share of household labor, would gravitate toward remote arrangements more heavily than men. The administrative records analyzed here complicate that narrative. Once commuting time, caregiving entitlements, and prior exposure to remote work are taken into account, the gap between men and women in revealed work-from-home propensity essentially disappears. This suggests that what often appears in aggregate statistics as a gendered pattern of remote work adoption may in fact be a composite of underlying differences in circumstances, such as where employees live, whether they assist a family member with a certified severe disability under Law 104/1992, or whether they had already begun working remotely before the formal hybrid regime was introduced. The distinction matters for policy: if the drivers of remote work are circumstantial rather than categorical, then flexible arrangements can be framed as neutral accommodations available to anyone whose situation makes them valuable, rather than as benefits targeted at particular demographic groups.

The caregiving measure deserves particular attention because of how carefully it is constructed. Rather than relying on self-reported attitudes, the authors use entitlement to paid leave and workplace accommodations granted under Law 104/1992, the Italian regulation that supports employees who assist a close relative with a certified severe disability. This administrative marker provides an objective signal of substantial caregiving responsibility within the household, one that is verifiable and uniformly defined across the workforce. Its strong predictive power for remote work usage indicates that flexibility functions as a genuine substitute for on-site presence when employees face constraints that make daily commuting and full-time attendance difficult. In this sense, remote work operates as a form of informal accommodation, complementing the formal accommodations the law already guarantees, and allowing employees with demanding household circumstances to remain attached to the labor market and to their careers within the institution.

Commuting time emerges as perhaps the most intuitive of the drivers, yet its significance carries broader implications for urban economics and transportation policy. When the value of a day spent at home is measured against the cost of a day spent traveling, employees with long journeys face a much higher effective price of on-site work. The finding that commuting time strongly predicts revealed work-from-home propensity aligns with a growing body of evidence suggesting that remote arrangements function, in part, as a mechanism through which workers recapture time otherwise lost to travel. For a public institution whose workforce is concentrated in a major metropolitan area, this dynamic has practical consequences: hybrid policies may reduce peak-hour congestion, alter demand for office space, and shift the geography of where employees choose to live, since the penalty for living farther from headquarters diminishes when fewer days of physical presence are required.

Prior exposure to remote work stands out as a driver with a distinctly behavioral interpretation. Employees who had already worked from home before the formal hybrid regime, whether during the pandemic emergency or through earlier informal arrangements, carried that experience forward into the new system. This persistence suggests that remote work usage is partly a matter of habit and accumulated familiarity rather than a fresh decision made under the new rules. Once an employee has learned how to organize tasks, communicate with colleagues, and manage supervision from a distance, that learned capacity does not vanish when formal policies change. The implication is that temporary exposures can have lasting effects: the pandemic-era shift to remote work, even if adopted out of necessity, appears to have permanently altered the baseline expectations and capabilities of the workforce, a pattern consistent with the stabilization of work from home at roughly one day per week among college-educated employees globally after 2022.

The managerial findings are arguably the most consequential for organizational design. The study documents that team-level remote work patterns are significantly shaped by the behavior of supervisors, with evidence consistent with a directional influence flowing from managers to subordinates rather than the reverse. This asymmetry is important because it rules out the simpler explanation that managers and their teams simply resemble each other, whether because similar people are grouped together or because shared circumstances drive everyone’s behavior simultaneously. Instead, the pattern points to supervisors as active gatekeepers of flexibility: their own choices about when and how often to work from home set a visible standard that their teams appear to follow. Notably, the supervisors’ own socio-demographic characteristics, such as gender, age cohort, the presence of young children, or commuting distance, do not significantly predict the individual propensities of their employees, which suggests that what transmits from manager to team is behavior rather than background.

This directional influence connects to a long tradition of research on leadership and social influence within organizations. Leader-member exchange theory, developed over decades of scholarship, emphasizes that the quality of the relationship between a supervisor and each subordinate shapes how resources, trust, and discretion are allocated. Remote work arrangements fit naturally into this framework, since the decision to allow or encourage work from home is a form of discretion that supervisors exercise, whether formally or informally. The finding that managerial behavior shapes team patterns even under a formal hybrid regime highlights a tension inherent in flexible work policy: rules can establish entitlements and limits, but the day-to-day practice of flexibility is negotiated within relationships, and supervisors effectively determine how much of the formal allowance is realized in practice.

The onboarding dynamics add a temporal dimension that is often missing from cross-sectional studies of remote work. New hires begin their careers within the institution relying more heavily on on-site work and only gradually converge toward the norms established by incumbent teams. Established teams, meanwhile, remain largely unaffected by the arrival of newcomers, indicating that the direction of socialization runs from the existing group to the new member rather than the other way around. This pattern is consistent with classical theories of organizational socialization, which describe how newcomers make sense of their environment, absorb its norms, and adjust their behavior accordingly over time. In the context of hybrid work, the on-site presence of new employees during their early months may serve functions that are difficult to replicate remotely: building relationships, observing how experienced colleagues handle problems, and learning the informal knowledge that circulates within teams.

Research on the power of proximity to coworkers has emphasized exactly this trade-off, contrasting the training and mentorship benefits of physical presence with the productivity and flexibility benefits of working from home. The convergence pattern documented here suggests that new employees, or the organization acting on their behalf, effectively resolve this trade-off by front-loading on-site presence during the period when learning is most intensive and then relaxing it as the newcomer becomes fully integrated. For organizations designing onboarding programs under hybrid regimes, this offers a concrete principle: the early months of employment are when physical presence yields the highest returns in terms of socialization and skill acquisition, and policies that mandate or encourage on-site work during this window may pay dividends in later cohesion and performance.

The setting of the study, a large public institution operating under a formal hybrid regime, gives these findings particular relevance for the public sector. Administrative data from the Bank of Italy, covering both operational staff engaged in secretarial and administrative activities and managerial staff with responsibilities in economic research, financial analysis, and supervisory activities, provide a level of detail that survey-based studies cannot match. Because the measure of remote work propensity is behavioral, derived from actual usage records rather than stated preferences, it avoids the well-known gap between what employees say they value and what they actually do. This revealed-preference approach is especially valuable in a domain where stated attitudes may be shaped by social expectations, fear of appearing uncommitted, or uncertainty about how remote work will affect career prospects.

The distinction between operational and managerial areas of the workforce also enriches the interpretation of the results. Roughly half of the workforce as of December 2023 belonged to the operational area, performing tasks whose remote feasibility varies considerably, while the managerial area comprised employees whose work in research, analysis, and supervision may differ in its suitability for home-based performance. The exclusion of contractors and top executive roles from the analysis sharpens the focus on the core permanent staff, whose employment relationship with the institution is stable and whose usage patterns reflect genuine choices within the formal framework rather than contingent or contractual arrangements.

Placed in the broader context of the post-pandemic labor market, the study contributes to an accumulating body of evidence that hybrid work has settled into a durable equilibrium rather than a transitional phase. In the United States, the share of paid workdays performed from home rose from roughly five to seven percent in 2019 to nearly sixty percent during the spring 2020 lockdowns before stabilizing around twenty-eight percent by mid-2023. Global surveys of working arrangements report similar stabilization among college-educated employees. The persistence of these patterns across countries, sectors, and measurement approaches suggests that the forces documented here, including individual valuation of flexibility, managerial gatekeeping, and organizational socialization, are not artifacts of a particular moment but structural features of contemporary work organization.

The finding that hybrid arrangements are shaped by formal rules, individual preferences, managerial behavior, and socialization processes simultaneously carries implications for how organizations should approach the design and sustainability of flexible work policies. If policies are calibrated only to formal entitlements without accounting for the circumstantial drivers that make flexibility valuable to particular employees, they risk being either too generous, straining operational capacity, or too restrictive, pushing constrained employees toward less desirable alternatives. If they ignore the managerial layer, they may find that formal allowances are unevenly realized across teams, producing perceptions of unfairness even when the rules themselves are uniform. And if they neglect onboarding, they may find that new cohorts fail to integrate into the flexible norms of their teams, or conversely, that premature reliance on remote work deprives newcomers of the proximity benefits that support early career development.

The methodological contribution of exploiting variation in managerial assignment deserves emphasis as well. Because employees are assigned to supervisors in ways that are not fully under their control, the study can separate the influence of the supervisor from the characteristics of the employee and the team. This identification strategy, borrowed from research on CEO behavior and firm performance, allows the authors to make claims about causation rather than mere correlation in the managerial domain. The result that supervisor assignment shapes subordinate remote work patterns, while supervisor demographics do not, points to behavior as the channel of influence, a conclusion that would be difficult to reach with less granular data.

Finally, the study’s reliance on confidential administrative data held by the institution, which cannot be disclosed or distributed due to data protection restrictions, reflects a broader tension in empirical research on workplace practices. The richness of administrative records enables precise measurement and credible identification, but it also limits replication and transparency. As research on remote work matures, the field will likely benefit from combining studies of this kind, which offer internal validity and behavioral realism, with survey-based and experimental approaches that offer broader coverage and easier replication. The convergence of these methods on similar conclusions about the persistence of hybrid work, the importance of circumstantial drivers, and the gatekeeping role of managers strengthens confidence that the patterns documented here reflect durable features of modern work rather than temporary adjustments to an extraordinary period.

Subject of Research: …

Article Title: Revealed Remote Work Preferences: Drivers, Managerial Impact, and Onboarding

Article References: Mariani, M., Ristuccia, L., & Montanaro, P. (2026). Revealed Remote Work Preferences: Drivers, Managerial Impact, and Onboarding. Social Indicators Research, 185(2), Article 8. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-026-03956-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11205-026-03956-z

Keywords: remote work, hybrid work, revealed preferences, managerial influence, onboarding, work from home, organizational socialization, commuting time, caregiving responsibilities, public administration, Social Indicators Research, Bank of Italy