The Impact of Remote Work on Employee Motivation and Productivity

Topic
This master's thesis examines how remote and hybrid work affect employee motivation and perceived productivity in Swiss organisations. Drawing on Self-Determination Theory, it analyses how employees experience remote and hybrid work in relation to the basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness. The thesis focuses on how these need-related experiences are interpreted by employees and how they shape their motivation and perceived productivity under different work arrangements.

Relevance
Remote and hybrid work have become established elements of contemporary work organisation, particularly in knowledge-based and office-related occupations. However, their effects on motivation and productivity are not uniform. While remote work can provide flexibility and autonomy, it may also weaken informal interaction, feedback and social connectedness. Understanding the conditions under which remote and hybrid work are experienced as motivating and productive is therefore highly relevant for organisations designing sustainable post-pandemic work models.

Results
The findings show that autonomy is the need most consistently supported by remote and hybrid work, mainly through flexibility, reduced commuting and greater control over daily work organisation. Competence is strengthened when tasks are clearly defined, digitally accessible and suitable for focused individual work, but weakened by technical problems, missing information and difficult coordination. Relatedness is the most fragile dimension, as digital communication supports functional collaboration but only partly replaces informal social presence, recognition and trust-building interaction.

Implications for practitioners:

• Design remote and hybrid work arrangements according to task type, role requirements and coordination needs rather than applying one uniform model across all employees.
• Use remote work especially for focused individual work, administrative processing and analytical tasks, while maintaining planned presence for leadership, onboarding, sensitive coordination and trust-based client interaction.
• Combine trust with clear expectations, reliable feedback routines and transparent availability norms to avoid both excessive control and boundary blurring.
• Treat informal interaction, recognition and social connectedness as deliberate elements of hybrid work design rather than as incidental by-products of office presence.
• Ensure reliable technical infrastructure and fully digitalised processes, as these directly affect employees' perceived competence and productivity.

Methods
The thesis follows a qualitative research design based on ten semi-structured interviews with employees in Swiss organisations using remote or hybrid work arrangements. Participants were selected purposively to include variation in occupational role, remote-work share, work context and coordination intensity. The interviews focused on concrete work situations in which remote or hybrid work was experienced as supportive, difficult or ambivalent. The data were analysed through a theory-driven qualitative content analysis with deductive and inductive elements, using Self-Determination Theory as the sensitising framework while remaining open to patterns emerging from the material.