Hybrid didn’t break productivity; it broke the methods leaders used for it. Offices gave us certainty, identity, rhythm, apprenticeship, and visible ambition pathways, mostly by accident. Mandates buy presence, but presence does not equal productivity. The fix isn’t ‘more office’; it’s designing those mechanisms on purpose and measuring them directly.

Return-to-office mandates keep making headlines, but the debate is stuck in the wrong frame. Five years on, hybrid isn’t a phase; it’s the default. Employees won’t give up flexibility, and organisations can’t ignore the talent and retention benefits it brings.

In this article, we will explore the real drivers behind RTO, what leaders are missing, and how to run hybrid well. The core message is simple: culture and performance don’t come from presence, they come from design. Leaders who stop measuring attendance and start redesigning work for outcomes will turn hybrid from a compromise into a competitive advantage.

Part 1: The Current State of Return-to-Office

The office is not “back.” It is in a state of negotiation, a constant bargaining ground between leaders and employees.

Five years on from the pandemic, leaders still talk about return-to-office as if we are rewinding to 2019. The evidence is clear: we are not returning. Hybrid is the new equilibrium.

Across the developed world, employees now spend just over a day a week at home. That figure has barely shifted in two years. U.S. office utilisation sits at half its pre-COVID level, with Tuesdays and Wednesdays buzzing and Fridays nearly empty. In the UK, close to a third of the workforce splits time between home and office. In Australia, where some employers have adopted stricter mandates, hybrid has stabilised as the norm.

The exception is government. In Washington, Trump’s order to bring federal employees back doubled the number of civil servants now fully office-based. It is a stark case of strategy eating culture for breakfast (instead of vice-versa, which is widely accepted as the truth). Years of hybrid routines gave way overnight. Yet even when leaders force people back into offices, the fundamental advantages of flexible work remain: higher retention, better access to talent, and lower commuting costs. Mandates can drive attendance, but they cannot sustainably undo labour market dynamics that make flexibility attractive.

So why the continued noise? Because leaders are watching the wrong signals. Occupancy is easy to measure; outcomes are not. CFOs worry about their return on investment on unused office footprints. Politicians want bodies visible in city centres because the citizens who run businesses in these once-flourishing areas are now struggling. And when organisations talk about “culture” or “buzz,” they often mean informal learning, which happens through informal, accidental and serendipitous moments between employees.

Informal learning occurs when knowledge is transferred between people who are working side by side: the overheard conversation, the feedback in passing, the quick chat after a meeting. It is not limited to new hires. Senior managers learn from peers, specialists share with each other, and culture is inherited this way more effectively than through manuals or training courses.

Leaders often invoke this as a reason to bring people back. But invoking doesn’t generate the best outcome; it must be designed. If informal learning is your strategic advantage, don’t leave it to chance. You need to create an environment that makes it visible and repeatable: shadowing, pairing, structured review loops. Simply filling a floor with people does guarantee knowledge transfer of a kind, but without deliberate design, the results will vary. Return to work mandates, saying "back to the office", lack intention; they don't explain why we want humans to interact. It also leaves on the table the possibility that there are alternative ways that team members can achieve these benefits, away from the office. A better frame is to state the intent: “We gather to accelerate learning and speed up decisions.” Then set boundaries: two shared days each sprint for collaboration, with the rest of the week designed for deep work. And measure the right outcomes: faster cycle times, fewer errors, stronger retention.

Hybrid is the new normal, and this is a great outcome. Employees keep flexibility. Organisations retain talent without losing performance. Cities get the mid-week bustle they need.

Part 2: Why Leaders Are Really Calling for a Return to the Office

The loudest calls for a return to the office are rarely about productivity. They stem from the inability of leaders to easily create the same outcomes they are used to in the room. Inherently, leadership is a social activity, and as such, all leaders seek the ability to express their identity, ambition, and pragmatism.

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‍Identity. For many leaders, work is more than a function; it is a self-definition. Titles shape how they introduce themselves, what they talk about at dinners, and how they measure their own worth. Remote work strips away the stage where this identity is performed. Without an audience, leadership, for some, feels diminished because, rightly or wrongly, leaders might think that if they are not physically near their team, then how do they exert influence?

Return-to-office is, in part, an attempt to preserve the visible theatre of role and rank.

Ambition. Career progression is still deeply tied to visibility. Research shows remote workers are 31% less likely to be promoted than their office peers, even with comparable output. One Fortune 500 company found that in-office employees received 22% more feedback, which directly fuels promotion opportunities. This is not productivity at play but proximity bias. Ambitious professionals know that, unfortunately, without redesigning how leaders engage in remote contexts, promotions are still won in corridors, coffee chats, and after-meeting chatter. To them, remote work is not just inconvenient; it is a career risk.

Pragmatism. Large office footprints remain a financial burden. Mandates create the appearance of efficiency, even when utilisation of the office assets doesn’t actually translate into greater organisational efficiency. In addition, politicians want visible workers to revive city centres. In regulated sectors, compliance officers often equate physical oversight with tighter control, even when digital safeguards can outperform manual supervision.

Put simply, the unseen leadership reasons for RTO fall into three buckets: psychological (identity), political-economic (visibility and ambition), and pragmatism (real estate and compliance). None of these directly concerns the quality of the work itself. And herein lies the problem: when all three are bundled under the vague banner of “culture,” leaders issue blunt mandates that obscure the true value of the office. If the real aim is identity, say so. If the concern is ambition, admit it. If the issue is cost, name it. Clarity of intent makes new solutions possible.

Part 3: What Leaders Are Missing About Return-to-Office

If the key reasons leaders push for RTO are about leadership identity and effectiveness, it is important to recognise that leaders are not just managing offices; they are possibly battling a more personal and inward loss.

Return-to-office debates often mask this truth. They are framed in the language of productivity (collaboration, culture, efficiency), but underneath lie five factors that hybrid work has destabilised. Each loss is existential, and mandates cannot patch them.

The loss of certainty. Attendance is visible; productivity is not. Leaders gravitate to badge swipe data because it resolves ambiguity. We associate visibility with productivity; however, when presence becomes the target, it stops being useful. In fact, the evidence shows that employee resentment increases when presence is required with no real purpose, other than to ensure people are in the office.

The loss of identity. Work is not just what we do; for some, it is who we are. Shakespeare wrote that the world is a stage; offices are the company's stage, where leadership is performed. Remote working collapses that stage. Without public recognition, roles can feel hollow. Organisational identity research confirms this: self-concept is tethered to membership and audience. RTO is often a bid to restore the stage, not the work.

The loss of rhythm. Synchronicity binds teams. Offices once gave a shared beat;  arriving, pausing, and leaving together. Hybrid working fractures that tempo. The Allen Curve showed decades ago that communication drops with distance; if not carefully managed, hybrid work can extend this to time. Fragmented rhythms weaken the sense of belonging. Remote work means that employees arrive to work invisibly, there is no shared elevator ride, no foyer and no shared kitchen where we prepare our morning cup of tea. Because of this missing shared beat, leaders will mistake this asynchronous rhythm and routine as a lack of buzz or worse, as cultural decline.

The loss of apprenticeship. Culture is learned by imitation, not instruction. Polanyi called it “knowing more than we can tell.” Remote stripped away much of this tacit transfer. Microsoft’s study of 61,000 employees showed remote work made networks more siloed, constraining knowledge flow. Leaders mourn the “loss of buzz,” but what they are really trying to put their finger on is the erosion of apprenticeship, the informal system for the transfer of knowledge and culture between people.

The loss of ambition pathways. Ambitious people have always recognised the importance of proximity and visibility. Offices provide the arena for signalling commitment and securing promotions. Remote workers are 31% less likely to be promoted and 35% more likely to be dismissed, even with equal output. The office, then, is not just a workplace but a marketplace where visibility is exchanged for opportunity. Hybrid makes that exchange harder to play.

The real miss. These five losses are the real fuel behind RTO. Leaders say “productivity,” but they act from loss of certainty, identity, rhythm, apprenticeship, and ambition. Mandates cannot solve these, because they are not solved by putting bodies back in buildings. They require design.

The way forward.

• Replace visibility with outcome systems. Make progress transparent without relying on physical presence.
  
  
• Anchor identity in clarity. Authority should rest on intent and impact, not theatre.
  
  
• Design new rhythms. Engineer purposeful overlap so teams regain synchrony.
  
  
• Systematise apprenticeship. Build structured rituals, such as shadowing, pairing, and reviews, to replace what proximity once provided by accident.
  
  
• Rewire ambition. Promotion must reward contribution, not commuting.
  
  

The lesson is simple: returning to the office is not about desks, but about meaning. Hybrid unsettles the old anchors of knowing, belonging, learning, and rising. Leaders who mandate attendance are missing the truth. Leaders who design for it can not only restore what was lost but also make it better, not by replicating the office but by reimagining how great leadership works in a remote environment.

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Part 4: How to Run Hybrid Well

Return-to-office debates are less about productivity than about the loss of certainty, identity, rhythm, apprenticeship, and ambition. Leaders reach for mandates because they appear like simple fixes to replace what was lost. But presence does not restore meaning. But when you design for it, a well-run hybrid system is not a compromise. It is a reset. It reimagines how people know, belong, learn, and rise.

The principles of a well-run hybrid system

1. Presence must be purposeful. Its value is instrumental: it accelerates decisions, strengthens bonds, and deepens learning.
   
   
2. Time must be synchronised. Shared rhythms matter more than filled calendars. They create the sense of “we move together.”
   
   
3. Learning must be designed. Tacit knowledge can no longer be left to osmosis; it requires deliberate rituals.
   
   
4. Ambition must be fair. Career progression must be rewired so proximity is no longer the primary currency.
   
   
5. Leadership must rest on clarity. Authority comes from intent and impact, not from surveillance.
   
   

These principles stop hybrid from being a halfway house and turn it into a deliberate design.

Redesigning the Future Workplace with the Miracle Question

One way to break free from the stale back-and-forth about mandates is to imagine the problem already solved. The “miracle question,” borrowed from solution-focused therapy, asks us to picture what would be unmistakably different if hybrid were working perfectly, then work backwards to design it.

“Suppose tonight, while you sleep, a miracle occurs. Your organisation now runs hybrid exceptionally well. You do not know a miracle happened, but when you start work tomorrow, what is the very first small sign that tells you things are different? What else would you notice as the day unfolds? What would your team do differently? How does your calendar look? Your conversations feel like, and your results show by the end of the week?”

The answer: a week in the life of an excellent hybrid

Monday WFH: Focus and legibility

• Work from home by default. Each team posts a one-page intent note for the week.
  
  
• Leaders publish a “decision queue” with names, owners, and deadlines. No status meetings, no mystery invites.
  
  

Tuesday Office day: Decisions and Stress tests

• Teams co-locate. Two rituals anchor the day:
  A decision point clears the queue before lunch, every decision logged and owned.
  A cross-team review in the afternoon stress-tests assumptions and exposes work to peer critique.
  
  

Wednesday Office Day: Apprenticeship and tacit knowledge transfer

• Shadowing and pairing are scheduled, not left to chance.
  
  
• Experts run micro-demos: ten minutes on how they think and work, and mental models are captured for reuse.
  
  

Thursday WFH: Remote refinement

• Deep work day at home. Reviews and pull requests dominate.
  
  
• A “two-tap” feedback rule. Every piece of work should receive at least two constructive comments before it advances. This ensures no submission is ignored, accelerates learning by exposing people to multiple perspectives, and reduces rework by improving quality earlier.
  
  

Friday WFH or Office: Demo and celebration

• Public demo: each team shares one outcome, one decision, one lesson.
  
  
• Recognition is tied to contribution and teaching, not visibility.
  
  
• Some gather for lunch, some sign off from home. Either way, the week closes with energy.
  
  

What changes underneath

• Presence is purposeful. Nobody asks “how many days?” They ask, “What is today for?”
  
  
• Time is synchronised. A few common beats bind the week into coherence.
  
  
• Learning is designed. Apprenticeship is visible, measurable, and repeatable.
  
  
• Ambition is fair. Promotion cases rest on contribution evidence.
  
  
• Leadership is clarity. Authority comes from unblocking work and articulating intent, not scanning a room.
  
  

The scoreboard

• Decision latency falls 40%.
  
  
• Rework rates fall by 20%.
  
  
• Retention improves, especially for early-career staff and caregivers.
  
  
• Promotion slates show equal advancement across locations.
  
  

The guardrails

• No shadow penalties for remote workers.
  
  
• Anchor days coordinated. Interdependent teams overlap.
  
  
• No meeting creep. Focus blocks are protected.
  
  
• Document it or it didn’t happen. If it’s not captured, it’s not a decision.
  
  

This is what hybrid can look like when done well: It's not a compromise, but a deliberate design for engagement and collaboration. Presence serves the outcomes and becomes meaningful and purposeful. Learning flows by system, not by accident. Ambition is fair. Leadership intent is clear and visible. Hybrid is not the end of culture. It is a chance to rebuild it deliberately, coherently, and better than before.

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From Principles to Practice: The Role of Infrastructure

Principles are necessary, but without supporting infrastructure, they risk staying aspirational. Leaders need systems that make presence purposeful, synchronicity achievable, learning visible, ambition fair, and leadership anchored in clarity. This is where digital tools like virtual offices matter.

The missing architecture.

• A persistent virtual office with a fixed address restores discoverability, colleagues can drop in, hold office hours, or create collisions without the surveillance of mandates.
  
  
• Rooms and rituals built into the platform help synchronise time by giving teams structured overlap and shared rhythms, even when distributed.
  
  
• Create spaces for shadowing, feedback loops, and peer-to-peer sessions. Formalise tacit learning that offices once produced by accident.
  
  

A Hybrid Work Policy.
Reframe leadership away from nostalgia and mandates, toward intent, clarity, and designed systems. 

Together, technical architecture (the operating system) and a Hybrid Work Policy (the guiding philosophy) provide a coherent framework: tools plus principles that let hybrid work deliver meaning, not just logistics.

The opportunity. Hybrid is not a halfway compromise; it is a reset. It forces leaders to answer questions that the old office solved by default:

• How do we know work is happening?
  
  
• Who are we together?
  
  
• How do we inherit culture?
  
  
• How do we advance?