Abstract
Hybrid work has emerged as the dominant work arrangement in the post-COVID era, affording employees the flexibility to alternate between the physical office and remote locations. However, we know little about how the temporal structures in this context shape and are reshaped by workers’ efforts to create and synchronize work rhythms. Drawing on in-depth interviews and diaries with knowledge workers, we explore how these workers experience and navigate time in the hybrid work context. The findings reveal that hybrid work shifts the responsibility to synchronize workflows from managers to individual workers, increasing the pressure for workers to temporally self-control—not only to determine their own work pace and rhythm but also to create and maintain the synchronization among group members. Despite individuals’ higher perceived autonomy, our participants struggled to enact such synchronizations of workflows. This persistent yet unsuccessful struggle ultimately leads to a phenomenon we call time control fatigue. Taken together, our findings contribute new insights into the emergence of new forms of control amid spatial dispersion of workers, wherein the responsibility for synchronizing with temporal structures falls mostly on individual workers, enriching theory on individual entrainment and temporal experiences.