Beyond the Office: Rethinking Work, Trust, and Power in a Post-Place World

Beyond the Office challenges the notion that hybrid work is the natural endpoint of the remote evolution. 

Blurb

Work is no longer where we go, it’s what we do. But while employees have adapted to working anywhere, many organizations haven’t caught up. As return-to-office mandates clash with new expectations of autonomy and flexibility, a deeper tension is playing out: not just where work happens, but how it’s understood, measured, and controlled.

Beyond the Office is a pracademic guide for leaders navigating this shift. Blending accessible theory, narrative research, and experience inside a global tech company, the book explores how remote and hybrid work are reshaping professional identity, trust, and power inside organizations. It offers practical, research-informed strategies for embedding flexible work systems, without losing the human or organizational core.

Rather than offering one-size-fits-all advice, this book helps readers reflect critically on their own contexts: what kind of culture are you building, and what kind of work do you want to enable? With insights spanning early-career employees to C-level leaders, Beyond the Office addresses the future of work not as a tech upgrade, but as a cultural transformation that’s already underway.

Why it Matters

Beyond the Office challenges the notion that hybrid work is the natural endpoint of remote evolution. Instead, it argues that remote work exposed deep assumptions about control, visibility, and productivity. These are assumptions that hybrid models often paper over without addressing. This book equips readers to:

  • Embed Sustainable Flexible Work Practices: Offer clear, actionable strategies to help organizations move beyond ad hoc solutions and design systems that support autonomy, trust, and accountability across remote and hybrid teams.
     
  • Reframe Professional Identity: Help employees and leaders at every stage of their career navigate shifting expectations and self-perceptions in an increasingly fluid workplace.
     
  • Critique Hybrid Work from Within: Examine hybrid arrangements not as compromises, but as contested sites where power, privilege, and resistance play out, drawing on critical theory to unpack these tensions in practical terms.
     
  • Support Culture Change and Leadership Transformation: Offer grounded insights on how leaders can foster culture, performance, and wellbeing when traditional management structures are no longer fit for purpose.

Release Date

Beyond the Office will release mid-2026 via Routledge (Taylor and Francis Group).

All professional activities and engagements are conducted through my current employer, Trimble Inc, in compliance with U.S. visa regulations.

Copyright © 2025 Owen Chamberlain. All rights reserved. 

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