Leadership for fostering employee engagement in Hybrid work

Hybrid work is a form of workplace transformation that requires employees to combine both remote and in-person work. While some employees return to the in-person work environment following the Covid-19 pandemic, others continue to work remotely with an increasing preference for a combined in-person and remote work model. Such hybrid workplace model has created new opportunities such as flexibility and autonomy, but also new challenges such as siloed teams and digital exhaustion. Within this context, there have been calls for leadership skills to be adapted (Hooijberg & Watkins, 2021; Gratton, 2021). We extend research in this area, by arguing that there is a need to understand the emerging and successful workplace leadership practices to strengthen employee engagement as we move towards the new hybrid work environment. Hence, the aim of this, work in progress, study is to explore how leaders in knowledge-based organisations can develop engagement with employees when a hybrid workplace model is in operation. The research question that drives the study is “How organisational leaders develop employee engagement in hybrid workspaces?”.