Social Well-Being from Hybrid Interactions in Hybrid Work

forthcoming

The HYIHY project investigates how HYbrid Interactions—blending face-to-face, digital, and human-AI communication—reshape social well-being in HYbrid work. To answer this, I propose communication episodes, their quality, and technological context as a unified lens. Through this lens, we can understand how complex sequences of face-to-face, digital, and AI interactions impact our sense of loneliness, connectedness, and community (i.e., social well-being). Ultimately aimed at formulating a Hybrid Interaction Theory (HIT), the project will dramatically move research beyond siloed insights from communication, psychology, human-computer interaction, sociotechnical studies, and public health. Social connection is essential for human health and well-being—and the work domain is essential for adults to feel socially connected. Two interrelated trends currently redefine adults’ social well-being: hybrid work, blending office and remote work, and the increasing digitalization of sociality described by hybrid interactions. UN, EU, UK, and US institutions have voiced serious concerns over a post-pandemic ‘loneliness epidemic’ in this new world of work, yet evidence on how workers can maintain their social well-being is severely limited. Three questions guide this project: (1) How do the various communication episodes in hybrid work shape social well-being? (2) How do digital channels and artificially intelligent (AI) interlocutors moderate these effects? (3) Which beneficial or harmful dynamics between face-to-face, digital, and human-AI communication episodes unfold in workers’ daily lives? To answer these questions and test multiple competing hypotheses, HYIHY combines qualitative, panel, experience sampling, experimental, and computational methods in a comprehensive work program. Informed by my findings, workers and stakeholders in labor unions, industry, and policy are well positioned to design, manage, and regulate hybrid and digitalized sociality in the future of work.