Original studyFrontiers in Psychology, 2026Read the paper →
Flexible working is often sold as a cure for burnout, yet the phones and laptops that free people from the office can keep them on call late into the evening. So is flexible working good for mental health? New research suggests the answer depends largely on whether bosses expect replies after hours.
Short answer: Flexible working seems to help and harm well-being at the same time. Employees with more freedom over when and where they worked felt more in control of their jobs, which went with better well-being, but they also reported more technology stress, which went with worse well-being. Where bosses expected replies after hours, the stress side won.
What the study looked at
A researcher at Nanchang University surveyed 462 full-time employees in Jiangxi Province, China, each from a different organisation. The study is published in Frontiers in Psychology. All used digital tools daily, and they included people working on site, from home, and in hybrid arrangements.
Just over half were women, and the largest age group was 31 to 40. About two in five worked hybrid, while around a fifth worked mainly from home.
Flexibility here meant freedom over when and where work is done. Autonomy meant control over how tasks are carried out and how decisions are made. Technostrain covered the anxiety, fatigue, scepticism, and sense of ineffectiveness that people can feel when work runs through screens.
Is flexible working good for mental health?
Workers with more flexibility reported more autonomy, and autonomy went with better life, workplace, and psychological well-being. Yet the same workers also reported more technostrain, which went with poorer well-being. The two effects were almost equal in size and largely cancelled each other out.
That helps explain why flexibility on its own showed almost no link with well-being. A weak link, the study argues, can hide two real effects pulling in opposite directions.
Why after-hours messages matter
The balance shifted with what employees believed their supervisors expected outside normal hours, such as answering messages during free time. When those expectations were low, flexibility was strongly tied to autonomy and only weakly tied to strain. When they were high, the link with autonomy weakened and the link with strain grew much stronger.
For workers facing high expectations, more flexibility went with lower well-being in total. At low expectations the benefits through autonomy outweighed the strain, although the total link was too small to be certain.
What the study cannot show
The study has clear limits. It captured a single moment, relied on self-report, and cannot show that flexibility caused any of these changes, since people with poorer well-being may simply see their work more negatively. It measured perceived expectations rather than actual messages, and the sample came from one Chinese province.
Several countries, including France and Australia, already give workers a legal right to disconnect outside working hours. The study suggests employers set clear response times and make switching off acceptable, though this was not tested.
Flexible working brings both control and stress, and bosses expecting after-hours replies tip the balance towards poorer well-being.
Frequently asked questions
Does flexible working cause technostress? Not necessarily. In this study, more freedom over time and place went with more technology strain, especially where bosses expected replies after hours, but the design cannot prove cause.
What can employers do to help? Clear rules on what counts as urgent, agreed response times, and permission to switch off may help, although these steps still need testing.
