Are we hybrid loners?

As a narrative person, I tend to be inspired by fiction. On even Tuesday evenings, I read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which has just celebrated its 100th anniversary since its first edition. In it, a man goes to visit his cousin in a sanatorium, but soon finds himself so enchanted by the sanatorium that he feels ill and becomes a patient there himself. The paraphrase is lame, but even at the risk, I wonder: have we become enchanted and trapped in the hybrid work made possible by technology?

Jouko Mäki-Korvela, HR Director. Also the title of this blog.
Centria established a code of conduct for mobile working in 2019. While the code largely applies to professional and support staff, it includes principles for annual staff; working time planning, HyFlex and other teaching guidelines and practices complement the teacher code of conduct. Our policies have always been loose and, compared to other polytechnics, even liberal. This is also in line with our values. We trust that Centrians will find the best ways of working for themselves.

Drilling through our employer image has revealed the trump card of location-independent work and flexibility in the recruitment market. At the workshop on Sustainability and Responsibility held on 22 January 2025 in cooperation with CSS (Centria-Samk-SeAMK), we also gave some thought to the impact of the reduction in the number of working hours in the national economy and the slowdown in commuting on the carbon footprint.