Time-Spatial Job Crafting and Other Self-Regulation Strategies in Hybrid Work: The Impact of a Self-Training Intervention

Hybrid work presents a challenge to employees’ self-regulation skills, requiring them to effectively manage their working time and location while balancing energy between professional and personal activities. The present study introduces a brief, multi-component, self-training intervention for hybrid workers based on solid theory for the choice of trained behaviors and for achieving change and examines whether the trained self-regulation strategies, i.e., time-spatial crafting, work-home domain management, and psychological energy preservation explain improvement on two distal outcomes, namely work engagement and goal attainment. Using a pretest–posttest intervention with a control group (intervention group: N = 39, control group N = 46) and cluster randomization, the training was executed over six consecutive workdays. The self-training included information about self-regulation strategies, reflection exercises, and five daily assignments. Results of multilevel analyses showed that the training effectively increased work-home facilitation and relaxation, which consequently explained increases in goal attainment and, in the case of work-home facilitation, work engagement. Moreover, univariate tests indicated the effectiveness of the training to stimulate time-spatial crafting. The results imply that self-regulating strategies are essential to improve valuable outcomes during hybrid work and can be trained.