What Happened:
Lynette Caruso, a PhD researcher at the Australian National University, studied three organizations with different hybrid models: a strict 50% office attendance policy, an “if-not-why-not” flexibility policy, and a case-by-case approach.
She found that culture and change management mattered more than policy design. In organizations where leaders signaled a preference for full-time office presence, flexibility existed on paper but not in practice, creating ambiguity and career disadvantages for hybrid workers.
Teams performed best when they were intentionally co-located at least one day per week. Hot desking, mismatched attendance, and compliance-driven mandates weakened collaboration, informal learning, and access to development opportunities.
Our Take:
Hybrid work is not a location policy. It is an operating model for how teams coordinate, build trust, and access opportunity. The core mistake organizations make is treating hybrid as a scheduling question when it is fundamentally a design question.
Start with alignment, not quotas. A mandate without cultural alignment turns into compliance theater. When leadership signals that commitment equals office presence, flexibility becomes conditional and career signals skew toward those physically visible. That is how hybrid quietly creates opportunity gaps. The issue is not how many days people are in. It is whether expectations, incentives, and advancement criteria match the stated model.
Co-location is about information flow, not optics. Teams need at least one shared day together for incidental learning, rapid problem-solving, and social calibration. When attendance is random, the office loses its advantage. Hot desking and mismatched schedules further erode value by separating people from the colleagues they actually collaborate with. In-office time must be intentional and collective.
Managers are the pressure point. Policies are written at the top, but experience is shaped at the team level. Without clarity, middle managers default to control. That tension is where flexibility breaks down. Organizations that want hybrid to work must equip managers to set clear team norms around communication, collaboration, and presence.
The hidden strategic risk is fairness. If in-office workers gain more visibility and stretch opportunities, hybrid becomes a structural disadvantage. Leaders should be asking whether advancement correlates with physical presence. If it does, the model is misaligned.
The myth to retire is the universal sweet spot. There is no magic number of days. What matters is work interdependence and shared time. One well-designed team day can outperform three random attendance days.
Stop debating percentages. Start designing the experience. Hybrid succeeds through alignment, co-location, and intentional team norms.
Listen to the full interview here.