Hybrid Teams and the Coordination Problem

Most organisations have settled into some form of hybrid working. The argument about whether remote work is productive has quietened down. The question now is whether the current arrangements are actually working well, and for many companies the honest answer is: not especially.

The root issue is coordination. When people are in an office together, a lot of communication happens informally. Problems surface quickly. Decisions get made in brief conversations that were never put in a diary. Someone overhears something relevant and mentions it. These small moments of connection add up, and they are very hard to replicate deliberately.

Remove those informal interactions and you need to replace them with something structured. Most companies have not done that. What they have done instead is layer more meetings and more messages on top of the same working patterns, creating a situation where everyone feels busier but nothing moves faster.

We worked with a professional services firm last year that had moved to a three-day-in, two-day-out model. On paper it looked reasonable. In practice, the in-office days had become a wall of back-to-back meetings because people felt they needed to use the face time for everything they could not do remotely. The remote days were then consumed by the follow-up messages and emails from those meetings. The net effect was that deep, focused work had been squeezed out entirely.

The fix is not to force everyone back five days a week. For most knowledge-economy businesses, that ship has sailed. The fix is to be specific about which types of work genuinely benefit from being together and which do not.

Planning, problem-solving, and relationship-building tend to work better in person. These are activities where nuance, body language, and the ability to sketch something on a whiteboard make a real difference. Focused individual work, writing, analysis, coding, often does not require a commute. In many cases, people do it better at home with fewer interruptions.

Companies that have made hybrid work well tend to do three things. First, they set clear expectations about when people need to be physically present, and they make those days count. The in-office days are structured around collaboration, not just co-located individual work. Second, they invest in the tools and norms needed to keep remote days productive. That means clear documentation, asynchronous communication habits, and a shared understanding of response times. Third, and this is the one most companies skip, they actively monitor whether the model is working and adjust it when it is not.

Hybrid working is not a policy you set once and forget. It is an operating model decision that needs the same ongoing attention as any other part of how the organisation runs. The companies that treat it that way are, in our experience, the ones getting the best results from it.