Leading Beyond Hybrid: Optimize for Collaboration, Not Just Location

March 26, 2025, by Stephanie Messier |

In early 2020, Anita P was in her groove as a leader and her team was producing great work. When the pandemic hit, they moved seamlessly to home-based offices with minimal disruption to their clients. Everyone stayed connected to Anita as leader via one-on-one meetings but were less connected as a team—-the focus was on individual work, doing whatever they could to keep the company operating.

Now that the pandemic urgency has faded, senior leaders are looking to pull out of “steady state” mode and focus on growth. They’ve been aggressively pushing Anita to bring her people back to the office because that’s where the “real” work is done. Anita’s team wants to keep working remotely, especially after proving they can accomplish their tasks from home. She knows her team isn’t working together well but feels stuck in a no-win situation.

Falling into the hybrid work trap.

Hybrid work—defined as giving employees the flexibility to choose a work location and/or schedule divided between an office location and home^[1]—is here to stay, but many organizations are struggling to make it work. It continues to be touted as the future of work (FoW) and many organizations are trying to optimize hybrid work setups for their knowledge workers and embed them into their organizational language.^[2]

And yet, I hear the same requests repeatedly from clients: how can we go back to the way it was, where the office was the default workspace for our teams? How many days in the office is the right number? How can we see them here more often, so we can work more effectively? Arguably, their employees may feel they are accomplishing their tasks and may view collaboration as more work getting in the way of their newly found work-life balance.

These feel like urgent conversations. The problem is, we’re asking the wrong questions.

Instead of wondering how to get back in the office, the real question should be, “how can we get people working as a team collaboratively and get the right things done, together?” We’re complicating it further by sticking with pre-pandemic approaches to organizing and leading teams.

We need to let go of focusing only on the logistics of hybrid work and create new mechanisms for getting the complex and critical work done.

Hybrid work isn’t new, so why are we struggling now?

Many of us have had some experience with team members who aren’t consistently in the office, whether because they work in a different country or work from home on a defined schedule.

Even before the pandemic, virtual teams had their challenges with collaboration and productivity. The difference today is that more and more individuals are asking to continue the remote work setup they had during COVID.

I’ve led hybrid teams for more than 20 years; first as a VP at GE, all the way to today where I lead my remote-first team at HR à la carte. As a result of the increased issues during the pandemic, I decided to make hybrid work effectiveness the focus of my Master’s in Learning and Technology thesis in 2023. My area of study was on “knowledge work” (where individuals own the means for completing their tasks), which I simplify to refer to as “work.” That led me to explore the research on the topic of collaboration and accountability in hybrid team environments.

I’m sharing everything I learned and the lessons I’ve started to apply with my clients, in the hopes of helping leaders, managers, and HR teams leverage the latest thinking to make hybrid work solutions more effective. This can result in higher levels of team performance, collaboration, and innovation without sacrificing the needs of their employees.

In our ongoing workplace discussions, we’re focusing on the logistics and policies of hybrid work, while ignoring the deeper need to solve how we handle the more complex tasks, like collaboration, decision-making, and team accountability.

There are lessons we can take from the research about what we’re getting wrong. Let’s dive in.

It’s not that hybrid doesn’t work, it’s that we’re doing it wrong.

We seem to have forgotten that work was accomplished during the pandemic. Clients were happy, revenue was generated, and we’ve seen the rapid development of technical skills and an increase in individual performance for knowledge workers.^[3] So why are we seeing so many organizations push back on continuing to work remotely now that the urgency of the pandemic has passed?

When we focus on policies and logistics, instead of the required outputs, we’re looking at hybrid work illogically.

In fact, as of 2023, studies have been focusing mostly on the design and structure of hybrid work in post-pandemic workplaces today.^[4] Workforce surveillance tools, designed to track the hours employees spend at their keyboards, ignore the conversations, collaboration, and even the recharging needs of employees. We aren’t factoring in the normal “walking around” needs that employees have to recover their physical and cognitive capabilities after hours of screen time, whether in meetings or completing work assignments.

We’re trying to go back to the way things were, without acknowledging that work wasn’t particularly effective in the past either. The things that are broken are amplified in hybrid spaces. And we need to fix them.

We’re trying to impose hybrid rules on employees, based on past assumptions about how work should happen—whether or not the past work styles were effective. Command and control didn’t work well before and it’s definitely not working now.

One example? Stop fighting biology by insisting on “camera on” meetings.

As I spend time with senior leaders and HR teams, I’m hearing policy efforts beyond the required number of days onsite. One example is the mandate (or “strong encouragement”) for employees to be “camera ready” or have cameras on for all meetings. This is primarily for the benefit of managers and facilitators, who want to see that people are present for calls and can watch facial reactions as the content is shared.

Certainly, some employees will benefit from this too. But overwhelmingly, this policy ignores the reality of human biology, which simply can’t sustain long hours in Zoom or Teams calls, which leads to cognitive impairment including fatigue. It also ignores the needs of neurodivergent team members who might be overly distracted in “camera on” meetings or who may feel the fatigue sooner.

We can’t argue with biology. This example is also a metaphor for how we’re approaching all aspects of hybrid work—pushing to mandate new norms and standards based on corporate preferences and an interest in (re)asserting control. The solution is an example of how new norms of working should be created; by having conversations as a team.

At the heart of hybrid work dissonance: addressing the very different needs of managers and team members.

This is the tension I’m hearing over and over again: leaders want to impose work conditions to get their team back and employees are asking for the ability to establish unique work arrangements to suit their needs, both professionally and personally.

In some organizations, the divide between these two approaches is increasing, with each side doubling down on their position. It’s creating a huge distraction from what should happen: getting the work done collaboratively.

If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you’ve had to acknowledge that some level of hybrid work is here to stay. So how do we address this widening gap on how remote work can be done?

Instead of discussions about work schedules, shift into optimizing for collaboration and creativity.

If we can agree that we need to optimize how hybrid work happens, both managers and employees need to step back from focusing on logistics. This isn’t the problem to solve. Instead, we all need to be making outcomes, including successful collaboration, the focus of our discussions.

For example, if we’re kicking off a new project, instead of trying to get agreement on when everyone will be in the office (or mandating it), focus the conversation on clarifying the desired end results and exploring gaps that might impact them. Spend time walking through the stages of a project or task and clarifying outcomes and metrics for each phase or step in a collaborative effort. And you can lead this process virtually.

We weren’t doing a great job of clearly defining outcomes prior to the pandemic, but we didn’t have the same level of universal experience with hybrid and remote work that we have now. We’ve had 2+ years of hands-on experience with it and we know it can work; now we need to figure out how to keep the parts that were working well and finally address the gaps.

Make optimizing for hybrid an organizational focus and core competency.

While we don’t have best practices in place to recommend yet, in my research and conversations with FoW experts, I’m seeing a trend of leading organizations launching initiatives (with the involvement of their employees) related to low collaboration or collaboration overload.

Banque Laurentian is at the forefront of defining new competencies for virtual collaboration. As their FoW leader, Stéphanie Villeneuve, AVP HR Transformation and Support Work-Life Experience Program Leader, Human Resources, notes:

“Our future of work strategy started with first having a conversation with our employees and listening to their concerns and insights without jumping to any solutions. And then, in collaboration with them, we co-constructed tools and resources to help them perform their work in a hybrid work environment. Our employees decide where they want to work without being restricted to a number of days in the office. By putting the employees in the middle of the decision-making process and not focusing only on solutions, we were able to progress in time through various future of work initiatives.”

By designing programs from the employee perspective, this collaboration was at the core of their FoW strategy.

First step forward: co-creating the conditions for great work.

To begin to close the divide, I start with conversations at the leadership level to begin shifting the focus away from directing and defining where work gets done, and instead focus on the needed outcomes. As a team, what solutions need to be created? What new products need to be launched? What are the tactics needed for achieving the strategic direction of the business? And finally, why are these initiatives critical to the organization?

The next phase is encouraging managers to have conversations with their team about defining new expectations for work. Questions like, how do we want to work together? Are there best locations for certain types of work or specific tools to optimize hybrid work? How will we keep the flow of work happening, irrespective of location? How do we uphold agreed upon team norms to each other? Essentially, getting a shared meaning of collaboration.

However, this won’t happen overnight.

Have ongoing conversations about work agreements for core activities.

For organizations to thrive in hybrid environments, teams need to spend time defining how critical group activities, like collaboration, problem-solving, decision-making, accountability, and difficult conversations, are discussed, solved, and implemented.

Set time to talk through every critical workflow with your team to clarify how best to do the tasks, what elements will be needed, and where they should occur. Don’t simply let difficult work default to the days when you’re together in the office; instead, explore ways to solve them in a hybrid space that might not be able to rely on everyone being in a shared room. Defining ways of collaborating synchronously and asynchronously is also important for a team to work effectively together. For instance, how can the team effectively communicate through a group chat with agreed-upon norms?

Without agreement on how complex and critical tasks are completed, work will remain individualized and task-oriented, with more complex tasks left ignored, delayed, or “saved up” to try and solve in person, especially decision making. Too often, decisions are delayed because teams are waiting for their in-office days to make them.

Build virtual facilitation capabilities.

What isn’t discussed often enough is the need for new virtual facilitation skills for leaders and employees. Every meeting is an opportunity to practice virtual facilitation: setting agendas, leading groups effectively through ideation, collaborating, making decisions, as well as defining outcomes, team norms, and tracking timelines.

Every employee should be taught the science and mechanics of optimal virtual meetings to understand how to respect the diverse needs of a group. This might look like saying in the agenda (sent ahead of the meeting) that 10 minutes mid-meeting will require on-camera presence “if possible” for a brainstorming discussion or difficult conversation.

It was also clear from the analysis and research I reviewed that having a trained facilitator to lead meetings can guide the group to work more collaboratively, help with solving problems, and make decisions.^[5]

Add incentives for team collaboration.

The shifts are happening. In one organization I worked with, they’re realizing that procedures aren’t enough, and they need to look more closely at the issues creating a lack of team collaboration and accountability.

As part of a recent engagement with the management team, the CEO uncovered the need to build accountability to engage in collaboration opportunities that will deliver results for both in-office and virtual workdays. Hybrid work has started impeding the company's growth and product innovation, so they’re realizing that new solutions are needed. We need to incentivize collaboration so our teams understand the urgency to solve this gap. At the least, all leaders should have a performance objective on team collaboration and people engagement surveys should include at least one question on hybrid team collaboration.

Given how rapidly hybrid work has been adopted and the scale of it, both within organizations and socially, it means we don’t have best practices to rely on. And the limited research on hybrid work environments has been focusing more on the logistics and structure of FoW and less on team synergies and dynamics. No doubt, new best practices will emerge.

Leverage new virtual and AI tools.

Changes in generative AI are coming at a rapid pace and can be instrumental in helping support your team in critical workflows. AI is moving quickly so it will be critical to continue to test and adopt tools that can improve your work tasks and efficiencies to create room and energy for collaboration and teamwork.

You can help your team optimize AI trends and new technology by assigning someone to investigate tools and integration, as well as keep current with changing trends. This will be an ongoing need, as AI will have a dramatic impact on how work is done in the next ten years. It will help you improve the innovation and collaboration gaps that hybrid can create.

For instance, a member of my team owns an AI based process and acts as the subject matter expert. We also take an opportunity to ask ourselves during our team meeting what is the most effective way to do this and AI can be leveraged, so we keep technologies top of mind for team effectiveness.

Where should a leader start?

There are a few approaches to shift away from hybrid work logistics and address the deeper issues of how work should be done, and in ways that involve your team:

• Let go of force-fitting solutions that mirror pre-pandemic realities; instead, shift focus to ensuring strategic direction, goals, and outcome priorities are being clearly communicated. It may take effort, but focusing on the what and why, not the where or the how, is what’s needed.

• Have conversations with your team about team effectiveness. Ask direct questions about what’s working and what needs to change or explore ways to help work be done more effectively. Then consider collaboratively developing a team norms agreement that includes a shared understanding of hybrid collaborative practices.

• Understand that this isn’t a one-size-fits-all or best practices exercise. We are flying the plane as we build it and adopting an agile and iterative mindset will be essential as we try new solutions and quickly evaluate if they’re working or if further changes are needed.

• Let go of old mindsets. We can’t continue to pretend that everything works better when we’re all in the office together. Proximity isn’t a replacement for effective work practices or skilled leadership.

• Put new processes in place for ongoing conversations. Discuss what’s working, where gaps exist, and ways to solve them. Consider team communication in synchronous and asynchronous fashion for these continuous conversations.

• Build new hybrid work organizational capabilities. Some organizations are establishing hybrid/remote work practice communities. This is something to explore both inside and outside your organization—working effectively irrespective of location will become a critical leadership competency.

It’s worth letting go of managing hybrid logistics and focusing on improving collaboration in every work environment.

The messages are clear: you’re going to lose great team members if you continue to focus only on the structural issues like forcing people to return to the office (and no, offering free yoga or better snacks isn’t the answer either). It’s time to let go of pretending that everything was working well before 2020, and instead, embrace new workplace approaches that encourage teams to solve the hybrid work issues through conversation and generate great work outcomes, together. The future success of your team, and possibly your organization, depends on

^[1] Trevor & Holweg, 2022

^[2] Deal & Levenson, 2021; Gratton, 2021; Haas, 2022

^[3] Babapour et al., 2022

^[4] Fayard et al., 2021; Kane et al., 2021; Gratton, 2021; Mortensen & Haas, 2021

^[5] Allison et al., 2015; Anderson et al., 2021