Hybrid work is here, but it doesn’t seem to get any more efficient. It doesn’t seem to actually address problems of engagement, morale or productivity. We ask: what’s optimum? Two days at home? Full time in the office? No matter what data you draw from, it seems that there’s a challenge few companies seem to be able to crack. Maybe we are addressing the wrong question. What if Hybrid Work as it currently exists is a way to address the challenge at the core of modern work—distributed teams.
Here's an example. Rajesh’s team has been told to go back into the office five days a week. That’s great, and people are complying. (Happily or not is actually irrelevant to the problem.) The sticking point is that while team members are in the office, it’s just not the SAME office at the SAME time.
Rajesh has a distributed team. He has a team member in Denver, one in Vancouver, one in Washington D.C., and another in London. Each has a desk in the company’s office in those cities, and they show up every day. But as the person in London is wrapping up their day, the Vancouver employee is just making her second cup of coffee. The team member in Denver is on a client site most of the time and not sitting at a desk with perfect network connections. Oh and it’s Thanksgiving Day in Vancouver, which is not even the same day as Thanksgiving day in the US offices, which means nothing to the people in London.
Even though the team is complying with the Return to Office (RTO) standards the company has set, it’s not addressing the challenges of working at a distance, or across time zones. Whether the team is truly hybrid or not is a complicating factor, but the underlying challenge lies in the fact that it will always be a distributed team. The function requires different people to be in different places and different times. Arguing about whether they have a permanent assigned desk or not is beside the point.
According to an article in the FlexIndex substack by Peter Cappelli and Ranya Nehmeh, at Microsoft the number of distributed or semi-distributed teams has more than doubled since before the Pandemic. (38% to 75%.) There’s no reason to believe this is an outlier, just look at your own experience.
The rapid expansion of distributed teams has come for a number of reasons:
- A desire to hire the best employees regardless of location
- Reorganizing teams by function rather than location, (largely enabled by technology)
- Hangover from the pandemic when people were often hired with the understanding they could work remotely at least part of the time and it was term of their employment
- Finding the balance of synchronous and asynchronous work that allows people to be productive while building and maintaining relationships
- The increasing demand for flexibility as a perk and part of their employment contract
Deciding how many days a week people need to be in the office, or what hours they work, or when they log into the network can help make sense of the situation. Settling on a hybrid work plan is easy. But the problems associated with distributed, (or long-distance, or partly remote, or whatever term you use) still exist.
Even though senior leadership thinks the problems have been addressed by putting in RTO mandates or hybrid work rules, there are challenges endemic to distributed teams that get covered up, but individual leaders still need to address. Among those challenges are:
- Proximity bias, perceived favoritism, and systems that reward physical presence versus quality of work and outputs. This has a corrosive impact on teams if leaders are not prepared to recognize this and act in new ways.
- Setting up workflows and communication challenges that recognize the realities of time, space, and dimension.
- Developing performance metrics based on both individual and team productivity, rather than physical presence in the office.
- Leaders developing the skills to coach, manage performance and give timely/effective feedback regardless of location.
Put simply, most hybrid work policies focus on what work gets done where, while distributed teams require thinking more like long-distance or remote first teams: How does the best work get done regardless of location?
While companies fiddle with their hybrid work policies, they ignore the real question. Do they actually have a hybrid workplace, or do they need to focus on the fact they are a distributed team?
The end of the COVID Pandemic sent people back to the office, but ignored the underlying change in how we really work in 2025. Just because people aren’t necessarily working from home, doesn’t mean remote work has gone away.
Leaders and organizations need to remember that and act accordingly.
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