Have you ever stared at a message in a team chat and wondered whether the tone was friendly, passive-aggressive or just hurried? For University of Auckland Business School Associate Professor Barbara Plester, that everyday uncertainty is part of a deeper story about how happiness itself is shifting in the age of flexible work.
Her new book, Hybrid Happiness: Fun and Freedom in Flexible Work, explores how humour, trust and emotional connection are changing as people split their time between home and office. Drawing on weeks spent observing and interviewing staff across two organisations—a technology firm she calls Gecko and a food manufacturer code-named Firefly—Plester found that hybrid work has reshaped the way people relate to each other.
“I took a grounded theory approach to my research; I didn’t start with any specific hypothesis of what I would find, rather I let the findings emerge organically as the study progressed,” she says. “This is how my research on fun and humour developed into a book about happiness, because participants conflated these ideas and constantly linked them.”
Her findings suggest that while flexible work brings freedom, it also introduces new tensions. One chapter, The Emotional Landscape of Hybrid Work, examines how digital communication creates emotional ambiguity. “Reading others’ emotions online is complex and raises questions about emotional regulation and emotional labour,” she writes. Emojis and GIFs may inject warmth into chat messages, yet they can just as easily confuse intent. “Pictorial language builds liveliness into textual conversations and can indicate fun, play and humour—but it can easily be misconstrued and misread.”
Elsewhere, Tech-Powered Freedom looks at how trust underpins successful hybrid models. Without it, flexibility collapses into surveillance. “Working in a hybrid model implies trust in workers,” Plester notes, adding that every participant reinforced this. One Firefly employee described how being trusted to work from home boosted productivity and calm: “I prefer working from home because I’m more productive there. I do feel stress when I’m around people, as much as I love them… but I prefer to be away from a crowd… it’s just about trust …trust. If you don’t trust your employee, why employ them?”
Another chapter, Psychological Safety in Hybrid Fun, turns to the idea of ‘forced fun’—social activities framed as team-building but often experienced as pressure. Plester points out that such contrived cheer can erode dignity and provoke cynicism. Her earlier research found that workers value the option to opt out as much as the chance to join in.
At its core, Hybrid Happiness argues that authentic connection, rather than mandated positivity, drives wellbeing in flexible workplaces. True “hybrid happiness,” Plester concludes, grows where organisations value empathy, adaptability and genuine human trust—qualities that can’t be scheduled into a calendar invite or captured in a smiley face emoji.
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