Hybrid work has brought many real benefits. Greater flexibility can make it easier to manage work alongside family responsibilities, personal commitments and other demands.

But it has also created new challenges, particularly for professional couples trying to build two careers alongside a shared life.

When work and family life increasingly overlap, couples can face difficult questions about how to share responsibilities at home and support both careers.

My colleague and I became interested in this topic because we could see both sides of hybrid work in our own lives. The flexibility was valuable, but it didn’t always make balancing work and the rest of life easier.

We wanted to understand what helps some couples make hybrid work arrangements work for them.

We interviewed couples where both partners were trying to build successful careers alongside a shared life. A unique aspect of our research was that we interviewed both partners, allowing us to understand not just individual experiences of hybrid work, but how couples navigate it together.

We found that making hybrid work successful depends not only on individual habits, but also on how couples coordinate their work and home lives together. Not all couples are looking for the same thing from hybrid work, which has implications for the kinds of flexibility........

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