The illusion of hybrid and how to make it meaningful

Last month, I had an interview for a so-called “hybrid” role: three mandatory days at the office.

The HR representative explained that the team was distributed, so most of my meetings would still happen over Zoom. “It might feel strange to go to the office and spend your day on calls,” she said, “but at least you’ll be here, creating relationships with people around.”

I asked what the benefits were, or whether there was any plan to make those office days actually meaningful.

No clear answer. No guidelines. No structure. Just presence for the sake of presence.

That conversation stayed with me because it captures exactly what hybrid has become in most companies: a policy dressed up as a culture.

When hybrid becomes theater

The pattern is everywhere. People commute, sit in open-plan offices, and join the same Zoom calls they could have taken from home. Leaders hope this will restore the collaboration and energy they remember from before, but instead it surfaces how much of that culture was never deliberately designed in the first place.

The problem isn’t hybrid itself. It’s that most organizations never defined what in-person time is actually for.

Is it for whiteboarding complex problems that benefit from real-time, physical collaboration? Team rituals that build relationships? Onboarding new people who need more than async documentation to understand the culture? Celebrating something worth celebrating together?

When you can’t answer that question clearly, every office day becomes an arbitrary attendance requirement. And people resist arbitrary requirements, not because they don’t want to collaborate, but because they can see the commute cost and can’t see the return.

The leadership pressure is real

I understand why companies landed here. Office leases are expensive to justify if teams are remote. There’s genuine concern about mentorship for junior engineers who need closer contact to grow. There are fairness questions when some roles can go remote and others can’t. And there’s real nostalgia for the kind of casual, ambient collaboration that happens when people share a physical space.

These are legitimate problems. The mistake is thinking mandatory attendance solves them.

As Will Larson writes in An Elegant Puzzle, systems need intention. Hybrid isn’t a perk or a penalty. It’s a system, and systems that lack clear purpose degrade into friction.

What intentional hybrid actually looks like

The teams where I’ve seen hybrid work well share a few habits:

Office time has a specific purpose. Sprint kickoffs. Architecture reviews. Retrospectives that benefit from in-person energy. Onboarding days for new hires. Team celebrations. The office days are calendared around those moments, not assigned as uniform mandatory attendance.

Remote days have structure too. Not “out of sight, out of mind” but explicit deep work blocks, clear async communication norms, and documentation that means people can actually work independently without constant synchronous check-ins.

There are rituals that cross both modes. A short weekly video coffee with no agenda. A quarterly in-person offsite that’s actually worth the travel. Recognition that happens publicly whether someone’s in the office or at home.

None of this is policy. It’s habit. And it requires someone to design it deliberately instead of hoping proximity will do the work.

Measuring the right thing

The most common failure mode: measuring presence instead of outcomes.

If the way you know hybrid is working is that people are in the office on the required days, you’ve already lost. Real presence is being engaged, aligned, and doing good work, and that happens in offices and living rooms alike.

The uncomfortable truth is that if your team’s collaboration and culture depend on bodies in seats, the issue predates remote work. Hybrid won’t fix a culture that was fragile before 2020. It just makes the fragility visible.

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