Maral Darouei

Many employees today work in a hybrid model, alternating between home and office days. While hybrid work offers clear benefits, such as greater autonomy, it also reshapes how employees interact with their organization. Research suggests that remote work may weaken social relationships at work (Beckel & Fisher, 2022; Vacchiano et al., 2024). This raises a key question: why do employees decide to work from home or in the office?

I argue that work location choices are shaped both by internal factors (such as daily motivational strivings) and external factors (such as organizational incentives and social context), and often by the interaction of the two. In this talk, I will share work-in-progress on two fronts: (1) how employees’ daily motivations and social environments influence their work location decisions, and (2) how organizational performance incentives affect where employees choose to work.