Hybrid work was never the issue - bad coordination was
Stanford research shows hybrid teams perform just fine - until unclear priorities, sloppy ownership and calendar chaos derail them. Presence can’t compensate for broken processes.
For the last four years, corporate leaders have been fighting the wrong enemy. Many blamed remote work, some took aim at hybrid work in its totality. Others blamed the office. Some blamed flexibility, Gen Z or whatever the ideologically madder wings of the financial press (aka places like The Daily Mail or The Telegraph) were panicking about that week.
The real problem was never where people worked. The real problem was the lack of effective coordination.
Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom has published research (based on randomised control trials) on hybrid-work that showed employees working hybrid (2 days a week at home) were just as productive as fully office-based workers. Furthermore, his data indicated that hybrid working does not damage productivity, while also securing talent retention.
And yet, CEOs of the swivel-eyed variety continue to wage a location war. You’d think the biggest issue facing the company is whether Jane from Finance is physically sitting in a swivel chair on Tuesdays.
Let’s break the news gently: Hybrid didn’t break your company. Your operating model was broken already. Hybrid just exposed it.
Coordination, not presence, drives performance
The Stanford data is brutal in its clarity: the most common drivers of hybrid performance decline were misaligned priorities across teams, vague accountability or ownership, inconsistent decision rights, poorly designed workflows and senior leaders pretending proximity equals clarity.
Meanwhile, hybrid teams with strong coordination mechanisms (clear workflows, explicit decision rights, rules for collaboration, transparent work-in-progress) showed no meaningful performance loss. A hybrid team with clarity outperforms an in-office team with chaos every single time.
In other words: it’s not hybrid that hurts performance. It’s messy, unstructured, leadership-shrugging-through-the-week coordination that does the damage.
The “Coordination Gap” nobody wants to talk about
Before 2020, office-based organisations relied on ambient coordination - the magical corporate hope that if everyone sits near each other long enough, work will somehow cohere. You didn’t need documented workflows, explicit ownership, clear boundaries and written decisions. You just needed an overheard conversation, a tap on the shoulder, or a whiteboard someone forgot to erase for three months.
Pre-hybrid, your operating model relied on “walking the floor” as a substitute for management and meetings as a substitute for decisions. It was proximity as a substitute for clarity.
Hybrid took those crutches away. Suddenly leaders had to design coordination. They had to define processes instead of hope. Guess how many actually did that? Roughly none.
So what actually works?
The highest-performing hybrid teams Stanford studied shared the same traits:
Written first, spoken second. Decisions, priorities, and updates exist in writing not floating around in someone’s memory.
Explicit coordination norms. Not “we’ll figure it out.” More like: When we meet, how we escalate, who owns what and what “done” actually means.
Fewer meetings, clearer meetings. Coordination does not mean or lead to calendar spam.
Workflow tools that aren’t graveyards. Task systems need to be living environments, not digital dust collectors. This isn’t rocket science.
Why leaders fought (and still fight) hybrid instead of fixing coordination
Because blaming hybrid is easy.
Fixing coordination is hard. It requires confronting bad spans of control, cleaning up workflows, defining real accountability (and confronting the politics of that), making decisions earlier and killing zombie projects.
Blaming hybrid and managing through CEO email diktats is leadership escapism. Fixing coordination requires real leadership and getting your sleeves rolled up.
Hybrid wasn’t the problem; it is just the setting. Your real problem is that your organisation doesn’t know how to coordinate work without relying on physical proximity to patch over leadership gaps.
Great article. I recently wrote a piece with a similar sentiment.
I think that this is so true - co-ordination has to include coordinating when to be together for work where in person collaboration is helpful but that is very different from a mandate to be in the office x days a week every week.