The widespread adoption of remote and hybrid work due to COVID-19 calls for studies that explore the ramifications of these scenarios for office workers from an occupational health and wellbeing perspective. This paper aims to identify the needs and challenges in remote and hybrid work and the potential for a sustainable future work environment. Data collection involved two qualitative studies with a total of 53 participants, who represented employees, staff managers, and service/facility providers at three Swedish public service organisations (primarily healthcare and infrastructure administration). The results describe opportunities and challenges with the adoption of remote and hybrid work from individual, group, and leadership perspectives. The main benefits of remote work were increased flexibility, autonomy, work-life balance and individual performance, while major challenges were social aspects such as lost comradery and isolation. Hybrid work was perceived to provide the best of both worlds of remote and office work, given that employees and managers develop new skills and competencies to adjust to new ways of working. To achieve the expected individual and organisational benefits of hybrid work, employers are expected to provide support and flexibility and re-design the physical and digital workplaces to fit the new and diverse needs of employees.

Activity-based Flexible Offices (A-FOs) are offices with unassigned desks that provide a variety of workspaces. This paper presents desk-sharing and speech rules identified in A-FOs in four Swedish organisations, the emergence of and compliance with these rules, and their consequences for work conditions. Data collection involved 105 semi-structured interviews, document analyses, and observations. The identified rules were: (1) to remove belongings, (2) temporal restrictions on using the same workstations, (3) temporal restrictions on using scarce zones, (4) restrictions on verbal interactions, and (5) restrictions on phone conversations. The cases with extensive user involvement in their planning process had explicit unambiguous rules. A better compliance with rules occurred when (i) the employees were well-prepared and had a unified understanding regarding how and why to follow the rules, (ii) the rules were explicitly communicated and were regarded as easy to follow, and (iii) following the rules facilitated work and improved work conditions.

In manufacturing companies, cognitive processing is required from assembly workers to perform correct and timely assembly of complex products, often with varied specifications and high quality demands. This paper explores assembly operators’ perceptions of cognitive/mental workload to provide a holistic understanding of the work conditions that affect cognitive demands and performance. While the physical loading aspects of assembly work are well known, most empirical literature dealing with cognitive/mental loading in manufacturing tends to examine a few particular aspects, rather than address the issue with a holistic system view. This semi-structured interview study, involving 50 industrial assembly operators from three Swedish companies, explores how assemblers perceive that their cognitive performance and well-being is influenced by a wide variety of factors within the context of mechanical product assembly. The interview transcripts were analysed using a priori coding, followed by bottom-up Thematic Analysis. The results indicate that a variety of systemic effects on assemblers’ cognitive performance can be classified as job demands or resources. Quite often, the absence of a resource mirrors a related demand, and “good assembly conditions”, as described by the interviewees, often re-frame demands as desirable challenges that foster motivation and positive feelings towards the work. The identified demands and resources stem from task design, timing, physical loading, intrinsic and extrinsic motivators, social teamwork and the product’s “interface” design. Despite organisational differences and conditions between the three companies that took part in the study, the results are largely consistent.

Purpose: This paper aims to investigate employee well-being in relation to office landscapes in a post-relocation context. The aims are to identify spatial attributes of the office landscape that influence employee well-being and underlying contextual factors that explain employee well-being post-relocation. Design/methodology/approach: A mixed-method approach was adopted. The data collection involved 16 semi-structured interviews with employees, an interview with the leading architect of the office renovation, study of a dossier on the renovation project and observations. Findings: Most of the informants experienced the new office landscape positively despite few shortcomings. Spatial attributes were identified that influenced the informants’ well-being positively in terms of affects, satisfaction, social relations and environmental mastery. Conversely, negative influences on well-being were also reported regarding affects, satisfaction and environmental mastery. Conflicting views on some of the spatial attributes and contextual factors related to the planning process and the former office landscape were identified. Originality/value: The value of this paper lies in investigating the office landscape at the spatial attributes level, despite office type, and their influence on hedonic and eudaimonic components of employee well-being. The research approach adopted proved its usefulness for in-depth studies of the interrelations between office landscapes and employee well-being.

In recent years, there has been growing interest in collaborative consumption of office environments and thereby implementation of Activity-based Flexible Offices (A-FOs). Relocating to an A-FO introduces a desk-sharing policy as well as a multitude of new workspaces with different speech policies into the employee’s work context. This paper describes how employees appropriate desk-sharing and speech policies in an A-FO. The data were collected over a period of 6 months in a case organization by means of 18 shadowing sessions. The different ways in which employees appropriated the A-FO solution were (i) adopting, experimenting with, or rejecting the desk-sharing policy, and (ii) modes of interaction arising from spatial configuration and redefining speech policies. The discussion outlines the reasons behind appropriation or nonappropriation of the desk-sharing and emergent speech policies. The insights from this study provide support for organizations considering A-FOs to develop strategies for facilitating individuals’ work in these settings.