The omnipresence challenge: enabling sustainable performance in the ‘always on’ era

• For employees, orchestrating physical and digital visibility is a continuous balancing act. Hybrid workers now leverage office attendance as a strategic career advancement tool while actively cultivating digital visibility. This new type of ‘presenteeism’ represents a fundamental shift in how employees try to demonstrate value. This suggests that organizations may need to review their culture, including messaging and expectations from senior leaders and managers, to focus expectations and performance measurement on outcomes and impact.

• Managing work-life integration is a constant struggle in the hybrid context. Employees establish sophisticated boundary management strategies amid growing workplace demands. Forward-thinking employers must acknowledge this challenge and support employees in maintaining a sustainable work-life balance.

• More than ever before, employees leverage omni-channel networks to build career capital. They cultivate both formal "reputational capital" and informal “social capital” across physical and digital environments. Organizations can support career advancement by designing environments that enable collaboration and encourage spontaneous interaction.

• Employees are divided between hopes and anxieties for the future. Hybrid employees navigate concerns about AI-related job security alongside expectations for continuous learning and fears of fragmented community. Employers that create the right mix of physical and digital experiences and provide upskilling opportunities will be best positioned to nurture a sense of belonging while securing long-term performance.

Hybrid and distributed work have transformed established work practices and values. At the same time, employees face increasing pressure to maintain ‘omnipresence’ – constant availability, responsiveness and visibility across physical and digital realms. In an era of accelerating skill obsolescence, sustaining this level of connectivity and relevance demands significant cognitive effort, contributing to mental fatigue and difficulty maintaining work-life balance. Managing the omnipresence challenge effectively will be key to delivering organizational value as well as balance for employees.

This article examines how hybrid professionals navigate this new landscape, mixing both physical and digital presence to maximize career advancement, wellbeing and social connections. Amid ongoing discussions about optimal office attendance, they employ new strategies beyond formal company policies. They leverage multiple channels to demonstrate value and presence while keeping up with personal responsibilities.

“In the new hybrid and distributed world of work, employees are increasingly seeing themselves like businesses - viewing their skills, assets, qualities, experiences and relationships as resources they need to constantly manage, enhance and strategically use.”

Melissa Fisher PhD, Cultural Anthropologist at Parsons School of Design, the New School and Visiting Scholar at New York University Institute for Public Knowledge

For global organizations, understanding these evolving dynamics is critical to sustain performance in the 'always on’ era. They should review (and potentially rethink) their organizational culture to ensure it still clearly reflects what is expected from employees in terms of outcomes and impact. Amid rapid technological change, organizations must define the optimal mix of physical and digital environments that enable employees to navigate expectations of omnipresence and performance while maintaining their wellbeing.

Our research, conducted in partnership with Melissa Fisher, PhD, Cultural Anthropologist, draws on an in-depth digital ethnography of 30 hybrid workers across five global markets: the U.S., the UK, France, India and Australia¹.

How professionals define value in their jobs and careers has shifted. Flexibility is now essential for knowledge workers as they seek purpose beyond their work. Across generations, many now prioritize wellbeing over traditional markers of success such as wealth and job title.

_{¹The research involved a diary study for five working days and a follow-up one hour interview with each of the 30 office workers. It also included a one-hour interview with scholarly experts from each of the key regions explored. Given the small number of individuals interviewed per country, these examples should, however, neither be considered as definitive nor be considered as the representation of cultural nuances.}

While work is no longer necessarily central to personal identity, hybrid workers feel growing pressure to remain visible and valued. To demonstrate performance, they actively leverage their physical and digital presence, optimizing how and where they appear to managers and colleagues.

Unwritten rules: Employees leverage disconnects between company policies and actual practices to establish their optimal routines, often agreed with managers.

Digital presenteeism: Professionals signal productivity through prompt email responses, active meeting participation, visible online calendars and engagement on social networks.

“The relationship to work is always complex: it defines social status, but people resist being wholly defined by work. Career is important, but not the most important thing. Balance and meaning are prioritized over pure advancement.”

Myriam Lewkowicz PhD, Troyes University of Technology, France

“Hybrid environments still require visibility. Digital networking platforms like LinkedIn replace traditional office socialization for career advancement. LinkedIn is now the watercooler.”

Clea Bourne PhD, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Looking ahead: organizations must recognize the shift in work priorities and rethink how they assess and support employee productivity across both physical and digital environments. 

As the line between professional and personal life becomes increasingly blurred, employees require strategies to manage work-life integration. Wellbeing has become a central priority, while work-life balance remains both an aspiration and a struggle.

Professionals manage expectations of omnipresence by actively establishing boundaries between work and personal time and employing transition rituals to minimize intrusions from one into the other.

Location and time-based boundaries: Many set clear rules for where and when specific work is undertaken, such as leveraging office days for collaborative tasks and reserving remote days for focused, individual work.

Transition rituals: Embedding activities that signal the shift between work and personal time-such as walking, changing into casual clothes or listening to music – is valuable when physical commuting is reduced.

Looking ahead: successful organizations will accommodate greater flexibility beyond hybrid work arrangements to better support transitions between work and personal modes, encouraging time management and genuine work-life integration – rather than constant connection as proof of commitment.

Professionals recognize that visibility impacts their "reputational capital". To project competence and reliability, employees cultivate not only their physical presence but a strong “digital self” through intentional online engagement and virtual connections.

Informal social capital remains vital for career progression, increasingly forged through strategic use of in-office time for relationship building and casual interactions that foster camaraderie.

Building rapport: During office time, employees prioritize deeper personal conversations that cultivate genuine connections, enabling more productive ways of working.

Nurturing diverse professional connections: In-office days are opportunities to nurture strong ties with immediate teammates, dense networks of close collaborators, and weak but valuable ties with colleagues outside core circles.

Looking ahead: organizations that foster meaningful connections-across both digital and physical spaces-will sustain stronger talent networks and employee community even as hybrid work schedules reduce the in-office overlap. 

For professionals, the omnipresence challenge brings contrasting yet interconnected anxieties
and aspirations.

Job security and AI disruption/professional growth and learning. Professionals worry about AI automation while valuing workplaces that prioritize continuous learning as protection against obsolescence.

Fragmented community/inclusive collaborative workspaces. Concerns about hybrid work disrupting social bonds drive aspirations for workplaces that foster meaningful connections.

Physical discomfort/innovative and adaptive spaces. Poorly designed offices undermine focus or productivity. Employees seek adaptable, tech-enabled spaces that support different workstyles
and activities.

Hierarchical and equity divides/empowerment. Generational expectations differ while office attendance policies often disadvantage caregivers. Employees desire autonomy to determine when, where and how they work, with performance measured by results rather than presence.

Work-life balance and burnout/holistic wellbeing integration. Blurring boundaries between professional and personal modes increases stress and the risk of burnout, driving demand for workplaces that support physical, mental and emotional wellbeing.

Looking ahead: successful organizations will create "phygital" environments focused on how work gets done across physical and digital realms, upskill workers for technological change, and design spaces and tools that accommodate diverse needs.

Navigating the omnipresence challenge

As professionals develop sophisticated strategies to navigate the complex hybrid reality, organizations must move beyond standard workplace policies and recognize fundamental shifts in how value is created and careers evolve.

The strategic framework below helps identify and support the priorities that drive employee performance, with practical steps leaders can take to embed these in workplace strategies.

Strategic HR framework

Leverage “implicit workplace rules” as strategic intelligence. Review the organizational culture to ensure it reflects that employee value is measured on outcomes and impact, dispelling perceptions that omnipresence and presenteeism are new markers of value. Analyze gaps between policy and practice to reveal where traditional structures need reinvention.

Build tailored performance frameworks. Develop nuanced, transparent evaluation approaches that recognize unique contributions and different work styles.

Redefine the workplace remit. Address digital overload, psychological safety, upskilling
needs amid rapid technological change, recognizing that employee wellbeing is integral to organizational resilience.

Develop integrated experience architecture. Adapt to different work modalities, career stages and cultural nuances across global operations.

How do our respondents imagine an ideal office?

We used AI generated images to help us visualize an ideal office, based on key attributes and functions described by the participants of our study

Practical workplace implementation

Engineer serendipity. Design environments to strengthen leadership and peer connections, with strategic touchpoints that prioritize quality interactions over mere presence.

Implement network cultivation technology. Deploy platforms mapping organizational relationships to identify connection gaps, facilitate knowledge transfer across silos and support strategic relationship building.

Develop adaptative workspace ecosystems and boundary management infrastructure. Create zones for ideation, community connection, spontaneous collaboration and deep focus. Develop environments and tools that support digital detox protocols and the transition between work-personal modes and recovery time, particularly for caregivers.

Optimize workplace environments strategically. Allocate resources to physical spaces that drive the highest value for key talent while enabling efficient operations for standard roles.

For global organizations, success means orchestrating talent ecosystems that span the physical and digital dimensions where both employees and organizations thrive amid the omnipresence challenge.

We extend our thanks to our survey respondents for their contributions and to the academic experts whose insights enriched this work: Myriam Lewkowicz, Full Professor and Head of UTT Master Deputy Director LIST3N Research Department, and Deputy Editor-in-Chief of CSCW Journal in France; Clea Bourne, Reader in Media and Market Studies at Goldsmiths University of London, UK; Andreas Cebulla, Associate Professor at Flinders University, Australia; and Smitha Radhakrishnan, Professor in the History of Ideas and Professor of Sociology Director at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, U.S.A.