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........

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