Why teams are still struggling with hybrid work
This week Harvard Business Review came in hot with breaking news, Hybrid Still Isn’t Working. As the authors write, "You cannot effectively manage teams of remote or hybrid workers using the methods you relied on when all employees were in the office together." Shocker! Another piece warning us that hybrid work is failing. That collaboration is down. That culture is eroding. That performance is tanking.
When I read the first few paragraphs of the article, alone at my home office desk, I shouted, “No shit!”
Of course hybrid isn’t working. Because hybrid is just remote with an identity crisis. When even one person on a team isn’t in the room, everyone—by necessity—is remote. Communication defaults to the lowest common denominator: Slack messages, video calls, shared docs. And the moment we pretend that someone being "in the office" means we can go back to hallway conversations and drive-by desk check-ins, we’re setting the team up to drift into misalignment.
Hybrid was always just a compromise. Not a strategy. And compromises tend to please no one. So it’s no surprise we’re seeing compromised employee satisfaction, reliability, and performance.
While I appreciate the author’s attention to the problem and effort to provide solutions, their idea that more governance is the answer is misguided. They cite GitLab’s remote handbook with "hundreds of pages" of guidelines as a model. Hundreds of pages. Hear me shout this with the bravado of ten tenors, nobody is reading a hundred pages on how to interact! Nobody is changing their behavior because a PDF told them to. That’s not culture. That’s paperwork.
Culture isn't how many policies you've published. It's what people do when nobody's watching. It's how people show up for each other, especially when the easy, informal cues of co-location are gone. Remote and hybrid work stripped those cues away and only years later are we able to see the holes.
Let me be specific about what we lost: the routine of getting out of bed, grabbing a quick breakfast, commuting through traffic or trains or sidewalks, walking through the company doors, saying a passing “hey” to a colleague, sitting down at your desk, joining a meeting, ducking out for coffee, bumping into someone in the hallway, using the office bathroom, seeing people leave for the day and doing so yourself, decompressing on the commute home. None of that was the work. But all of that was the context.
That context—the tiny, daily, invisible rituals—created shared vulnerability. We all endured the same friction. We all saw each other in real life, at our best and worst. And in that, we built understanding. We built trust.
Now it's gone. And what's replaced it? Empty screens. Slack status pings. Cameras off. We're not just physically apart—we're relationally untethered. In my opinion hybrid isn’t a patch, it’s adding noise.
So no, mixing up the seating chart or throwing more people into Zoom rooms won't fix what's broken. That's grade-school thinking. What we need are structured, intentional moments that restore shared humanity. Because without shared vulnerability, there is no trust. And without trust, there is no team.
How to actually lead in a hybrid world
Here’s how I help remote and hybrid teams build trust and alignment—without gimmicks.
1. Ditch the gimmicks. Start with the stories. Instead of strategic lunch pairings, I create rituals for real human connection. Every team member answers the same six questions:
- Where are you from?
- What did you study that got you into this line of work?
- How did you get to this moment in time?
- What kind of work do you do, in your own words?
- What would you like to learn this year (or quarter or month)?
- Who would you like to collaborate with?
It sounds simple. But it’s profound. These stories recreate the connective tissue we lost when we stopped sharing space. They restore a sense of journey, identity, and aspiration. And they build trust—fast.
2. Build a social contract, not a rulebook. Successful remote culture isn't about documentation volume. It's about mutual clarity. Ditch the dusty handbooks no one reads. Instead, I start with eight simple rules that outline how we work together. Then, I ask the team to engage with each one.
Here’s the process:
- Discuss each rule together: What does it mean? Why does it matter?
- Modify anything that doesn’t feel right until the team can agree.
- Then, delete the one rule that makes the least sense—and write a new rule to replace it.
- Once all eight rules feel real, do a stack rank using dot voting to reflect what matters most.
This isn’t just an exercise. It’s community-led governance. It’s a commitment. What you end up with is a co-created social contract that feels like a promise, not a policy. It defines:
- Availability: When and how we show up for each other.
- Communication: Which tools we use and how we use them.
- Feedback: How we offer, receive, and act on input.
- Boundaries: What’s okay to decline, and when we truly log off.
And most importantly, it’s a living agreement. Revisit it quarterly. Celebrate what’s working. Change what’s not. Make it a reflection of how you actually operate, not how you wish people would behave. This is vital to the success of productive teams.
3. Redesign meetings for depth, not surveillance. Virtual meetings should not be performance theater. Make them smaller. Shorter. Focused. No meeting should happen simply for sake of tradition. Require cameras not to watch, but to connect. Ban multitasking. Design meetings that require contribution, not attendance. And for everything else? Document it.
4. Reward contribution, not just completion. In hybrid settings, too many leaders default to tracking individual KPIs because that's what feels measurable. But when performance is defined only by task output, collaboration becomes optional. Recognize and reward the invisible labor: mentoring, context sharing, stepping in without being asked. These are the behaviors that sustain teams—and they're easy to lose when everyone's on mute.
5. Rebuild rituals of connection. We don't need more meetings. We need better rituals. Weekly wins. Public praise. Daily questions that go beyond status updates. Gratitude that flows freely. Visibility that isn't about optics, but about belonging.
Rebuild what matters, not what you remember
We don’t need to mourn the loss of in office productivity—we need to create a better and more supportive remote environment. The old rituals gave us connection because they were shared, not sacred. What matters now is rebuilding new rituals with intention. Rituals that foster trust, invite vulnerability, and respect the complexity of people’s lives outside the frame.
If you lead a hybrid or remote team, this isn’t the time to tighten the screws or build a bigger handbook. It’s the time to get real. Get human. And get clear. Start with one story, one social contract, one moment of honest connection—and build from there.
The future of work isn’t about where people sit. It’s about how people show up—for the work, for each other, and for the kind of culture they actually want to belong to.
T L ; D R — Remote work didn’t kill culture. Performative leadership did. Because we tried to copy/paste office culture into a distributed world, without reimagining how people connect when the old rhythms disappear.
Hybrid is broken because we’ve failed to lead in ways that reflect our new reality.
Want to fix hybrid? Here’s the truth:
- You don’t need more rules. You need real relationships.
- You don’t need handbooks. You need shared humanity.
- You don’t need mandates. You need meaning.
This is a crisis of leadership. Let’s stop papering over it with policy and start rebuilding trust on purpose. If this sounds good to you and you’d like to build confidence to make this happen on your team, you know how to reach us.
