From leadership research to district action: ‘Wish you were here’: Managers’ experiences of hybrid work in higher education

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

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Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: research-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

Abstract The prevalence of telework increased dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic, and today it is not uncommon to refer to hybrid work as “the new normal” in work life. Leadership plays a pivotal role in hybrid work transitions, underscoring the need for research on post-pandemic managerial practices. This qualitative interview study with 15 professional service managers at a Swedish medical university, working in either central administration or a research department, provides a nuanced understanding of the experiences of implementing hybrid work in a higher education setting. The qualitative content analysis resulted in three main themes and six sub-themes: New ways of organising work (sub-themes: Hybrid work brings new opportunities and needs, and Hybrid work as an ongoing process of change); Changes for employees (sub-themes: Social interaction and sense of community, and Increased work-life balance); and Changes in leadership (sub-themes: Communication with employees and New expectations on managers). The findings of this study provide a more fine-grained understanding of how managers experienced both challenges and opportunities in implementing and managing hybrid working arrangements. Challenges included managing employee expectations and relations, while opportunities included potential improvements in work-life balance. A key conclusion of this study is that managers in hybrid work environments adjust their leadership, especially when communicating and managing relationships within teams and across the organization. Despite the identified challenges and despite managers’ wish to see their employees in person and on site, the interviewed managers are generally optimistic about hybrid work and see it as the future. To address the identified challenges, managers may benefit from networking and exchanging information with other managers in similar situations, as well as support from their organisation.

Study methods

This study is part of a comprehensive evaluation of hybrid work among employees and managers working within the professional services at a Swedish medical university. This medical university has professional services employed both at various research departments and in a centralized administration. Moreover, the employees work from multiple locations (on two main campuses and several hospitals). In September 2021, hybrid work was implemented in several government agencies, including higher education institutions in Sweden. The current study focuses on managers’ experiences of the transition from having employees working almost exclusively on-site before the pandemic, working extensively from home during the pandemic, to a hybrid work arrangement after the pandemic in which employees combine on-site work with remote work. Hybrid work at the university was defined via a policy that allowed employees to work from another location up to 49 per cent of their working hours if it was deemed compatible with the needs of the department, which was discussed between the employees and their first-line manager.

Limitations

One strength of the current study is the in-depth descriptions of managers’ experiences of an ongoing transition to hybrid work, capturing their experiences of this process during the increase of hybrid work models implemented in knowledge-intensive workplaces following the COVID-19 pandemic. The current study also has limitations; while it is based on in-depth interviews capturing the experiences at one HEI, adding important new knowledge on hybrid work in this setting, its conclusions might not be generalisable to other contexts. Employees within HIEs often perform their work with high autonomy and discretion, and our results might therefore not be transferable to more controlled work contexts. Future research could benefit from including multiple HEIs and following managers’ experiences over time. Future research could also benefit from a research design aiming to catch potential gender-related patterns relating to managers and their perception of hybrid work, by including specific questions in the interview guide and formally analysing differences and similarities between female and male managers or female and male-dominated organizations or sectors. Furthermore, there might be inherent limitations when studying one’s own context and organisation. Even though there were no previous connections between the interviewers and interviewees, participants might be more prone to provide socially desirable responses when being interviewed by someone from the same organisation. To prevent bias due to social desirability, interviewers dedicated time before the start of each interview to inform participants about confidentiality and how the gathered data would be handled and reported [49].

A 90-day district inquiry

Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Helena Tinnerholm Ljungberg; Martina Wallberg; Emmanuel Aboagye; Gunnar Bergström; Christina Björklund; Lydia Kwak; Susanna Toivanen; Irene Jensen. ‘Wish you were here’: Managers’ experiences of hybrid work in higher education. PLOS One (2025-12-17). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0339120

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.