HYIHY: Social Well-Being from Hybrid Interactions in Hybrid Work
Funded as an ERC Starting Grant, the HYIHY project investigates how hybrid interactions — blending face-to-face, digital, and human-AI communication — reshape social well-being in hybrid work. To answer this, the project proposes communication episodes, their quality, and technological context as a unified lens. Through this lens, we can understand how complex sequences of face-to-face, digital, and AI interactions impact our sense of loneliness, connectedness, and community (i.e., social well-being). Ultimately aimed at formulating a Hybrid Interaction Theory (HIT), the project aims to move research beyond siloed insights from communication, psychology, human-computer interaction, sociotechnical studies, and public health.
Social connection is essential for human health and well-being — and the work domain is essential for adults to feel socially connected. Two interrelated trends currently redefine adults’ social well-being: hybrid work, blending office and remote work, and the increasing digitalization of sociality described by hybrid interactions. UN, EU, UK, and US institutions have voiced serious concerns over a post-pandemic ‘loneliness epidemic’ in this new world of work, yet evidence on how workers can maintain their social wellbeing in the future workplace is severely limited.
Three questions guide this project:
(1) How do the various communication episodes in hybrid work shape social well-being?
(2) How do digital channels and artificially intelligent (AI) interlocutors modulate these effects?
(3) Which beneficial or harmful dynamics between face-to-face, digital, and human-AI communication episodes unfold in workers’ daily lives?
To answer these questions and test multiple competing hypotheses, HYIHY combines qualitative, panel, experience sampling, experimental, and computational methods in a comprehensive work program. Informed by the project’s findings, workers and stakeholders in labor unions, industry, and policy are well positioned to design, manage, and regulate hybrid and digitalized sociality in the future of work.
If you want to know more about the HYIHY project please contact:
Prof. Dr. Adrian Meier
Professors
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Julius Klingelhöfer
Research associates
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This project is funded by an ERC Starting Grant:
The European Research Council (ERC) was established by the European Commission. It offers funding programs for outstanding researchers in Europe who are pursuing groundbreaking projects and innovative research ideas. ERC grants are highly regarded and specifically designed to support projects with a high potential for scientific and societal impact. These grants provide substantial funding and enable the funded scientists to pursue their research goals independently and at an internationally competitive level.