After-Work Recovery in Hybrid Work: Remote Work Intensity, Personal Resources, and Recovery Outcomes

The boundaries between work and non-work life have never been more blurred. As hybrid arrangements consolidate as the dominant model in knowledge-intensive sectors, employees increasingly move between professional and personal domains — often within the same physical space. While hybrid work offers autonomy and flexibility, growing evidence suggests it also reshapes the psychological mechanisms through which employees disengage from work, recover from daily demands, and protect their well-being. In this context, the rapid evolution of digital tools and the pervasiveness of communication technologies have introduced new complexities, making individual coping strategies to manage digital demands and psychologically detach from work a critical area of investigation.A central concern of this research topic is how to manage work recovery in the remote and hybrid work era. As working hours become increasingly blurred, the boundaries around recovery time become equally uncertain. The inability to psychologically detach from work, manifesting through various forms of rumination, unfinished tasks, and difficulty in disconnecting, may be related to impaired sleep, emotional exhaustion, and reduced next-day work engagement. Recent research on remote work intensity and general self-efficacy in work-related rumination suggests that the intensity of remote work — rather than its mere presence — interacts with individual resources such as general self-efficacy to shape after-work recovery trajectories. Yet many open questions remain about how organizational, technological, and personal factors jointly determine whether and how hybrid employees achieve psychological detachment.This Research Topic invites empirical, theoretical, and methodological contributions that advance understanding of recovery outcomes in hybrid and flexible work contexts. We welcome quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods, longitudinal, and diary-based studies, as well as reviews and meta-analyses.Suggested themes include, but are not limited to: • Remote work intensity, work intensification, and recovery outcomes • The role of technologies in remote work intensity and work recovery • Technostress, digital overload, and the impact of ICT-enabled constant connectivity on personal resources. • Manifestations of (un)successful detachment (e.g., rumination, worry, proactive work thinking) across hybrid configurations. • Personal resources (self-efficacy, mindfulness, boundary management preferences) in recovery outcomes • The role of digital communication, after-hours connectivity, and “right-to-disconnect” policies • Leadership behaviors and team norms that support psychological detachment • Cross-cultural and cross-occupational comparisons of recovery in hybrid settings • Gender, caregiving responsibilities, and the unequal distribution of recovery opportunities • Interventions promoting detachment, sleep quality, and sustainable performance • Methodological innovations in capturing recovery processes in real time (ESM, wearables, AI-assisted measurement)By integrating perspectives from occupational health psychology, organizational behavior, and human resource management, this Research Topic aims to build a more nuanced, evidence-based understanding of how hybrid work reshapes the recovery process — and what individuals, teams, and organizations can do to safeguard well-being and sustainable performance. Topic editors: Andrea Ceschi, Simona Margheritti, Massimo Miglioretti, Salvatore Zappala Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/81376/after-work-recovery-in-hybrid-work-remote-work-intensity-personal-resources-and-recovery-outcomes