Beckers' research focuses on work flexibility. This is a broad and societally relevant topic that has implications for workers' effort-recovery balance as well as their work-life balance. Currently, Beckers studies the opportunities and challenges of hybrid working and working from home for employees’ well-being and work participation. Her research projects mostly concern applied, interdisciplinary projects in which scientists and stakeholder parties from practice collaborate to generate knowledge and to develop evidence-based tools. Through her research projects, Beckers hopes to contribute to knowledge building on how extended forms of work flexibility (such as substantial working from home) can be implemented responsibly to benefit both the employee and the employer.
'A 'one size fits all' approach does not exist for work flexibility,' Beckers says. 'It is important to learn more about the conditions under which work flexibility has favourable or unfavourable effects for organizations and specific subgroups of workers.'
About Debby Beckers
Debby Beckers (Oss, 1980) began her academic career at Radboud University in Nijmegen, where she attained her master's degree in Work & Organizational Psychology in 2003. She continued her career with a PhD project on the relationship between overtime work and well-being, after which she started working –as assistant professor and later on as associate professor—in the research group Work, Health & Performance at the Behavioural Science Institute. Since 2023, she is director of this research institute. In her academic career, Beckers acquired several interdisciplinary team-based research grants related to societally relevant topics. A recent example is a project funded by ZonMw. The aim of this project is to develop a practical evidence-based guideline that helps to responsibly embed working from home in return-to-work trajectories after long term sickness absence.