Remote and hybrid work require organizations to manage trade-offs across multiple boundary domains.

Leaving some boundaries open preserves discretion but increases the need for employee interpretation.

Employees adapt to boundary ambiguity in predictable ways, often prioritizing visibility and responsiveness.

Frustration signals misaligned boundary strategies rather than inherently flawed work arrangements.

The pandemic forced a rapid shift to remote work—a shift many organizations were unprepared for. Post-pandemic, that disruption hasn’t resolved into a single “new normal.” Instead, organizations have adopted a wide range of approaches, from fully remote arrangements to strict return-to-office mandates, with countless hybrid variations in between.

Whichever approach organizations adopt, it creates a new set of boundary decisions that must be managed. Decisions about where work happens are often made explicitly at the policy level, while many other boundary decisions—particularly around time, availability, and responsiveness—are left open or delegated to local interpretation.

Those questions are typically resolved more locally (e.g., in teams, managerial discretion, departments). Over time, those local-level norms can result inconsistent expectations and growing dissatisfaction, with some surveys finding that large percentages of workers are actively looking for a new job (Morgan McKinley, 2025).

That dissatisfaction points to a deeper issue—one that sometimes has less to do with which policy is chosen and more to do with how boundary decisions are made in the first place. That issue was the focus of a recent theoretical paper by Perrigino and Raveendhran (2025) on what they call strategic boundary control.

Strategic Boundary Control

At its core, strategic boundary control reflects how organizations adapt control and coordination under conditions where direct oversight is limited. Remote and hybrid work arrangements don’t simply relocate work; they require organizations to make choices about how participation is structured, how coordination occurs, and how access to employees’ time and attention is organized.

Strategic boundary control doesn’t imply that all boundaries should be fully specified. Organizations routinely make some boundary decisions explicitly—most notably around location—while allowing others to remain flexible or locally interpreted. Expectations about time, availability, responsiveness, and coordination often take shape through shared norms and managerial judgment rather than centralized rules. This reflects the practical difficulty of fully specifying boundaries across diverse roles, tasks, and interdependencies.

Consider a common hybrid arrangement in which employees are expected to be in the office two or three days a week for collaboration, with the remainder of the week designated as remote. The policy clearly addresses where work should occur, but it often leaves open questions about availability, responsiveness, and coordination on remote days.

Teams resolve these questions through routines—when meetings are scheduled, how quickly messages are answered, and which patterns of availability signal engagement. Over time, these routines shape how work is coordinated, even though they were never articulated as formal boundary rules.

Seen this way, boundary control is neither inherently good nor inherently problematic. Different kinds of work benefit from different boundary configurations. Some tasks require tight coordination and rapid responsiveness; others benefit from insulation and uninterrupted focus. The issue, therefore, is one of how boundary decisions are distributed—and how well those choices align with the demands of the work.

Strategic boundary control, then, is best understood as the management of trade-offs rather than a choice between flexibility and rigidity. Decisions about location, time, availability, and coordination inevitably interact, and emphasizing one dimension while leaving others open reshapes how work is experienced. When those interactions are aligned with task demands, boundary strategies can support both coordination and autonomy. When they’re not, strain can emerge because the underlying trade-offs are difficult to balance.

The Trade-Offs of Boundary Ambiguity

When organizations leave boundaries around time, availability, or responsiveness loosely specified, employees don’t simply relax into the flexibility. They interpret the ambiguity and adjust their behavior based on the inferences they make. That interpretive work is not a failure of design so much as a predictable consequence of leaving discretion in place.

In the absence of explicit guidance, people look for cues—how quickly others respond, who schedules meetings when, and which behaviors seem to be noticed or rewarded. These signals function as informal substitutes for formal expectations, especially when evaluation criteria are evolving or only partially specified. Over time, employees construct working assumptions about what “counts,” using whatever information is available to them.

Some ambiguity preserves flexibility and allows behavior to be tailored to situational demands. At the same time, it introduces uncertainty about how choices will be interpreted. Under those conditions, people tend to favor options that reduce perceived risk. Being responsive feels safer than being unavailable. Showing up feels safer than opting out.

The trade-off is that these inferred expectations are rarely shared or negotiated. They remain individual and provisional, which means employees may be responding less to clear demands than to their own interpretations of what might be noticed or penalized. Over time, boundary control shifts from policy to psychology: availability becomes a signal of commitment, responsiveness a proxy for engagement, and impression management an unrecognized part of the job.

Importantly, none of this requires bad intent. Leaving boundaries open can be a deliberate way to preserve discretion and adaptability. But when ambiguity substitutes for shared understanding, the balance tends to drift toward caution rather than coordination, and the costs are absorbed unevenly by employees.

Managing Boundary Trade-Offs Over Time

Frustration with remote and hybrid work isn’t a mystery, and it isn’t simply resistance to change. It reflects the difficulty of navigating boundary trade-offs that don’t have stable or universal solutions.

Decisions about how much structure to impose and how much discretion to leave open are rarely one-time choices; they require ongoing adjustment as roles, tasks, and interdependencies evolve. Treating those decisions as administrative details rather than as design tensions makes that adjustment harder.

That challenge is compounded by the fact that COVID permanently altered many employees’ frame of reference for what work can look like. Greater flexibility is now imaginable—and often expected—which makes ambiguity around boundaries harder to tolerate than it once was. At the same time, fully specifying boundaries risks undermining the very flexibility employees value. Organizations are caught between competing pressures, not simply making poor choices.

This helps explain why hybrid work is so often experienced as challenging. In theory, it promises the best of both worlds. In practice, it requires organizations to combine boundary strategies that pull in different directions—preserving discretion in some domains while imposing structure in others. When those trade-offs aren’t explicitly acknowledged and revisited, tension can build, and otherwise reasonable policies begin to feel taxing.

Strategic boundary control doesn’t require perfect foresight or rigid rules. It requires recognizing that where, when, and how work happens are inseparable decisions—and that there is no single “right” balance across contexts. The challenge lies in managing the ambiguity deliberately.

When that balance drifts, dissatisfaction isn’t a surprise; it’s a signal that boundary trade-offs have shifted and the design work needs to be revisited, consistent with broader evidence showing that remote and hybrid work outcomes hinge less on blanket policies than on how organizations navigate their inevitable trade-offs (Grawitch et al., 2023).

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