Most hybrid working problems are not technology problems. The video call drops occasionally, yes, and the room microphone is still terrible three years after everyone bought one. But the real failures — the ones that quietly drive people out the door or stall their careers — are behavioural. They are the manager who defaults to the office crowd when deciding who to involve in something interesting. The team meeting that works well for the four people sitting together and is barely tolerable for the three on camera. The remote employee who is technically available and practically invisible.
Hybrid working has been mainstream since 2021. Most teams have stopped calling it an experiment and started calling it the job. What they have not done, in most cases, is work out how to manage it deliberately. This guide is an attempt to fill that gap.
The problem nobody talks about
The dominant conversation about hybrid working has been about where people sit and how many days they should come in. These are genuinely contentious decisions with real business and lifestyle implications, and the arguments are not resolved here.
What the location debate tends to crowd out is the more tractable problem: how do you manage equitably across a team that is not always in the same place?
The honest answer for most managers is: not very well, yet. Not out of malice, but because the instincts and habits that make someone effective at managing an in-person team are not automatically transferable. Visibility is much easier in a shared office. Spotting someone who is struggling, pulling them aside, picking up on what is not being said in a meeting — these come naturally when you are physically present. They require deliberate effort when part of the team is elsewhere.
The managers who have adapted well are not doing anything particularly sophisticated. They have just noticed that hybrid requires them to be more intentional about things that used to happen automatically.
The proximity bias problem
Proximity bias — the tendency to favour people we can see — is the structural risk in hybrid working. It is not a personality flaw. It is a cognitive default. The person who walks past your desk, catches your eye, and stays for five minutes has an interaction with you that the person working from home does not. Multiply that across a year and it shapes who you think of when a stretch assignment comes up, whose face comes to mind when you are asked for a recommendation, and whose concerns you find most vivid when you make decisions.
Research on this is consistent: remote workers receive fewer promotions, less access to information, and fewer development opportunities than equivalent colleagues who are physically present. The effect is stronger the more informal the decision-making culture.
There are a few practical interventions that blunt this effect.
Rotate the decisions. If you are deciding who to involve in something, notice whether you are defaulting to whoever is in the room. Ask yourself who you have not involved recently. Hybrid teams need a more active approach to access and inclusion than co-located ones.
Track your one-to-ones. If you have a mix of in-office and remote direct reports and your 1:1s with the office ones happen reliably while the remote ones drift, proximity bias is already doing work. Consistency matters more than convenience here.
Make your reasoning visible. When you give someone a project, a development opportunity, or a piece of positive feedback, say why. “I thought of you for this because you’ve been doing well with [x]” is much harder to experience as favouritism — in either direction — than a decision that appears from nowhere.
Hybrid meetings: the specific failure mode
Hybrid meetings — where some people are in a room together and others join on a screen — are the format most likely to produce the experience of inclusion while actually delivering exclusion.
The people in the room can see each other’s reactions, have side conversations, catch each other’s eye, and speak at normal volume. The people on screen see a tableau of the room’s backs, cannot always tell who is speaking, struggle to interrupt without talking over someone, and are the last to be invited to contribute. The asymmetry is structural and it does not go away by reminding people to “make sure to include the remote folks.”
A few adjustments that actually help.
Everyone on a laptop. When the in-room attendees use individual devices rather than a room camera, the experience becomes more equal — each person on the same-sized square. This feels counterintuitive (“why come into the office just to sit on a laptop call?”) but it substantially reduces the second-class experience for remote participants.
Assign a facilitator, not just a chair. The chair of a hybrid meeting is managing the agenda. A facilitator is actively managing participation — specifically watching for remote participants who are trying to speak, calling on quieter voices, and summarising what the room has been discussing informally before the meeting properly started.
Start remote first. When asking for input or reactions, go to the people on screen before the people in the room. They are more likely to disengage; asking them first gives them a reason to stay present.
Decide in writing. Decisions made verbally at the end of a hybrid meeting, in the room, while two remote participants have dropped off or are clearly wrapping up, are not shared decisions. A short written summary — even a few lines in a shared channel — prevents the pattern where office employees know what was decided and remote ones find out a day later via someone else.
Knowing when to bring people together
One of the clearer lessons from the last few years is that not all work benefits equally from in-person time. Processing email, solo writing, most individual analytical work — remote is often better, with fewer interruptions and more control over conditions. Creative problem-solving, team relationship-building, onboarding, difficult conversations, and complex negotiations tend to benefit from being in a room.
The mistake many teams make is not deciding this deliberately. They set a blanket policy (everyone in on Tuesday and Thursday, say) and then end up using in-person time for the work that could have been done remotely, while doing the work that benefits from physical presence on a video call, because that happens to be the day’s meeting.
A more useful approach: think backwards from the purpose. What genuinely requires people to be in the same place? Schedule in-person time around those things. Project kick-offs, team workshops, sticky problems that need a whiteboard and a frank conversation, and regular social touchpoints that maintain culture — these are good uses of in-person days. Status updates and information broadcasts are not.
This requires some courage to say. “We don’t need everyone in the office for this — let’s do it on a call” is not a popular message in organisations that have invested in hybrid office spaces. But if the in-person day consistently contains work that didn’t require presence, people will gradually stop valuing the norm of being there.
Managing performance by output, not observation
One of the more quietly anxious tensions in hybrid working is the manager who is not sure whether the people they cannot see are actually working. This anxiety is rarely spoken aloud — it tends to manifest as checking in too often, requiring unnecessary updates, or setting expectations around response times that are really about reassurance rather than business need.
The honest answer to the “are they working?” question is: you mostly could not answer it in an office either. What you actually knew, in an open-plan office, was that someone was present. Whether they were productive during that presence was not straightforwardly visible. Hybrid working just removes the comfort blanket of presence.
The more useful framing is output. What does good work look like for this person, in this role, over a month? Are they delivering it? If yes, and you are still anxious about whether they are working hard enough, the anxiety is about visibility, not performance — and visibility is not a management metric.
Where remote and hybrid working does require more explicit attention from managers is in people who are not performing. The behaviours that signal someone is struggling — disengagement in meetings, missed commitments, shorter and shorter responses — are visible in both settings, but easier to explain away remotely. “They were probably just busy” covers a lot of early warning signs on a screen that would feel harder to dismiss in person. Regular 1:1s are the mechanism for catching this early. There is no substitute for them.
Developing people across distance
Development conversations — the ones about where someone wants to go, what they are finding hard, what they need to grow — require a quality of attention that is genuinely more difficult to sustain on a video call.
This does not mean they cannot happen remotely. It means they need to be protected more deliberately. A quick catch-up on a screen is not a development conversation. A scheduled, uninterrupted 45 minutes in which the manager has reviewed their notes from the previous conversation and arrived with something specific to build on — that is.
There are also development interventions that are harder to deliver remotely: ad hoc coaching in the moment, giving someone visibility in an important meeting by physically having them in the room, or the kind of informal mentoring that happens over lunch or at the end of a long day. Hybrid managers need to be more intentional about creating these moments rather than waiting for them to occur naturally.
One approach worth considering: for employees who are in an active development phase — new to a role, working towards a promotion, or going through something difficult — skew their in-person time towards these moments. Not as a rule, but as a deliberate choice.
Norms, not rules
The hybrid teams that function well generally share one characteristic: they have explicit norms. Not HR policies about office days, but team-level agreements about how they work together. What counts as a synchronous situation versus one that can be handled asynchronously. How quickly people are expected to respond to messages. When a conversation needs to move from a thread to a call. What the team does together in-person, and what stays remote.
These norms are not complicated. Most teams could write them in an hour. The reason most teams do not have them is not that they are difficult to produce but that someone has to call the meeting to create them, and that feels like a big thing to do. It is not. A team retro with one question — “what’s working and what’s not working in how we operate as a hybrid team?” — surfaces the material. Writing it down and agreeing to revisit it in three months is the infrastructure.
The manager’s job here is to start the conversation, not to arrive with the answers. The people who can tell you most accurately what is broken about how the team operates are the people living it — particularly the ones who are predominantly remote and have learned not to say.
Related reading
- Leading teams — trust, feedback, and building a team that works regardless of where people sit
- High-performing teams — what separates teams that perform from teams that function
- Communication skills — practical frameworks for clearer communication across distance and difference
Managers who want to build structured competence in hybrid leadership — including managing performance, running effective meetings, and developing remote staff — can find CPD pathways at SkillsCircle, developed by Accipio. For a full CMI-accredited qualification in leadership and management, Aicura offers apprenticeship-route programmes available to levy-paying employers.