Macquarie Business School, Macquarie U., Australia
Due to the impact of remote work during the COVID lockdowns, many organizations have been struggling to find a framework that balances benefits of working remotely and in-office. Although the literature acknowledges that subjectivity is crucial in this context, as different people perceive the same environment differently, it provides limited insights into the mechanisms underlying employees’ perception about the variability of remote work environments. Using person-environment (P-E) fit theory, this paper seeks to understand the role of subjectivity in P-E fit and how managers and employees navigate within this subjectivity during the implementation of a WFH policy. To analyze this, we conducted a qualitative study involving 79 semi-structured interviews and on-site observations within a public organization that introduced a new WFH policy which required employees to work from the office 3 days a week. Employees’ responses are categorized into five discourse types: fit ("flexwork supportive"), partial fit ("task management" and "conditionally selective"), and misfit ("office believer" and "office resistor"). Managers, meanwhile, employ pragmatic counter-discourses to mitigate misfits and align employees’ perspectives with organizational priorities. The findings reveal that employees’ understanding of fit extends beyond traditional P-E fit dimensions (job, organization, group, and supervisor) to include subjective beliefs about work environment. By integrating subjective lenses into P-E fit theory, this study challenges conventional notions of environment and fit, proposing that these constructs can be shaped by an individual perception of proper work
