Every few weeks another article appears telling us that hybrid working has either transformed modern employment or quietly destroyed it.
One business leader declares that working from home is the future. Another announces that careers are being damaged by staying away from the office. Someone else publishes a survey suggesting collaboration has fallen off a cliff, before another survey arrives a fortnight later apparently proving the opposite.
It’s become one of those debates where everyone seems very certain, despite very little actually being certain. I’ve always found that slightly curious because, in my experience, most organisations aren’t really wrestling with hybrid working. They’re wrestling with culture.
Hybrid working simply has an unfortunate habit of exposing it.
I’ve worked with organisations where people spend most of the week working remotely and remain deeply connected to each other. They communicate well, know what they’re trying to achieve and, perhaps most importantly, trust one another. Problems still arise, of course, because that’s what happens whenever human beings spend enough time together, but they tend to deal with those problems sensibly before they become something bigger.
I’ve also seen organisations where everyone is together in the same building every day, yet departments barely speak, meetings feel performative and collaboration exists mainly as a word in the annual report.
The office itself isn’t creating the culture, the people are, and that distinction sometimes gets lost.
The current conversation often centres on attendance. How many days? Which days? Who decides? Those are perfectly reasonable operational questions, but they’re rarely the most interesting ones.
The more useful questions are usually much simpler.
Do people understand what’s expected of them?
Do managers communicate consistently?
Can people disagree without relationships deteriorating?
Do employees trust the decisions being made, even when they don’t necessarily like them?
Those are cultural questions, and they don’t become easier simply because everyone is sitting within sight of the same coffee machine.
One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that respectful organisations tend to travel well. By that I mean the behaviours that make people feel valued don’t depend very much on geography. Respect isn’t something that exists because people happen to share an office. It’s reflected in the way people speak to one another, the assumptions they make, the way feedback is delivered and how leaders behave when pressure starts to build.
I’ve never met anyone who finished a difficult meeting and thought, “Well, that was disrespectful, but at least we were all physically present.” Equally, I’ve worked with remote teams whose relationships felt remarkably strong because there was clarity, consistency and a genuine willingness to communicate properly.
The medium matters far less than the behaviour. That’s where I sometimes think organisations become distracted. It’s understandable. Debating office attendance is tangible. You can write a policy about it. You can count days. You can produce graphs.
Culture is much harder because it requires judgement. It asks leaders to think about tone as well as targets. About trust alongside productivity. About whether managers are creating environments where people feel comfortable asking questions, admitting mistakes or saying, “I’m not sure I understand where we’re heading.”
Those conversations are considerably more difficult than deciding whether Tuesday should be an office day.
Recent comments from business leaders suggesting that working from home amounts to career suicide have inevitably reignited the debate. I understand where some of those concerns come from. Early careers often benefit from observation, informal conversations and learning by osmosis. There is genuine value in being around experienced colleagues. But it doesn’t automatically follow that spending more time in the office produces better culture.
Presence isn’t the same thing as connection. We’ve probably all experienced meetings where everyone was physically present while mentally somewhere completely different. I’ve also sat in offices where the great return to “collaboration” involved rows of people wearing headphones, sitting in silence, and taking Teams calls with people who were three desks away.
At that point, the issue clearly isn’t location, it’s intention. If organisations are asking people to come together, they need to think seriously about what that time is actually for. Being in the office should create something useful: better conversations, quicker decisions, stronger relationships, proper learning, a bit of energy in the room.
If people are commuting just to sit silently on video calls all day, I’m not sure we can call that culture. That’s just remote working with worse lighting and a sandwich from Pret. Making the most of in-person time requires thought. It means designing office days around connection, collaboration and learning, not just attendance.
This is where I think HR has an especially important role. Not because HR should decide whether organisations adopt two days in the office or five, but because someone has to keep asking the questions that sit underneath those decisions.
How will new starters build relationships?
How will managers stay visible?
How do we stop communication becoming purely transactional?
How do we make sure quieter voices are still heard?
How do we maintain a culture where people feel respected regardless of where they’re working?
Those questions don’t disappear because a policy has been written. In fact, that’s usually where the real work begins.
The same applies to AI, which increasingly finds itself woven into discussions about the future of work. AI will almost certainly improve efficiency in countless ways. It will draft documents, summarise meetings and automate tasks that nobody particularly enjoys doing.
What it won’t do is quietly notice that a usually confident colleague has stopped contributing in meetings. It won’t sense that a team is becoming disconnected or recognise the subtle shift in tone that often comes before bigger cultural problems emerge.
People notice those things. Good managers notice them even sooner. Perhaps that’s why I remain slightly sceptical whenever I hear sweeping statements about where people should work.
Location has become an easy proxy for conversations that are actually about leadership, trust and respect. Hybrid working didn’t invent poor communication. It didn’t invent disengagement, and it certainly didn’t invent unhealthy workplace cultures.
What it has done is remove some of the structures that used to hide those issues. In that sense, perhaps hybrid working has been rather useful. It hasn’t created the cracks, it’s simply made them easier to see.
