Exploring the Role of Visibility in Hybrid Work

<p><strong>Hybrid work, combining remote and onsite work, has become the norm, evolving from the concept of telecommuting (nowadays more commonly known as remote work) introduced nearly half a century ago. Advances in information and communication technologies have enabled work across distances, challenging traditional office-centric models. As hybrid work adoption has increased, concerns about reduced visibility persist, becoming more pronounced as organizations mandate a return to the office (RTO). Visibility is critical for various organizational functions, including monitoring, mentoring, coordination, and execution. However, visibility as a concept in hybrid work has remained unclear and poorly defined, making it challenging to establish empirical studies for its exploration. This thesis refines the concept through a conceptual framework (Study 1), identifying seven dimensions and sixteen characteristics, thereby redefining visibility. It reveals visibility as a continuum and a double-edged sword, necessitating balance to avoid extreme consequences of too much or too little visibility. The scope of this study was expanded by examining avatars as visibility artifacts representing employees in digital work (Study 2). This research identified five key aspects of avatar-enabled visibility and introduced a theoretical framework of avatar visibility, emphasizing contingent factors that shape avatars' dual capacity to enable or limit visibility. The first two studies established a foundation and framework for the subsequent two empirical studies, which deepened the investigation of visibility in hybrid work through a case study involving insights from 42 interviews across diverse roles in two countries. The first empirical study (Study 3) explored visibility artifacts as technologies channeling visibility for work and workers, finding these artifacts to be interconnected and subject to interpretation, with miscommunication leading employees to temporarily obscure their visibility. The second empirical study (Study 4) showed the central role of visibility in hybrid work, introducing the concept of “visibility dumping” and presenting the “vicious cycle in hybrid work” as a product of theorizing. It demonstrated how imbalances in visibility—either too little or too much—can transcend time (e.g., delays in interaction) and space (e.g., shifting visibility to the office). This thesis underscores the pivotal importance of visibility in hybrid work, advocating for shared understanding and common ground to balance the benefits of remote and onsite work, advancing theoretical and practical insights for sustaining hybrid work and digital contexts.</strong></p>