Hybrid Work: How Leaders Build In-Person Moments That Matter

As hybrid work programs continue to grow in popularity and full-time office work declines, many leaders and companies are still struggling with a tough question: What are the right patterns for getting people together?

Free-for-all approaches that depend on individuals and managers to self-organize hybrid work norms don’t succeed — the coordination tax is just too high. I’ve seen this up close in my work with dozens of organizations. These ad hoc models result in people showing up to quiet offices, retreating to conference rooms to be on Zoom all day, and commuting home with a bubbling resentment about having traveled in for no clear reason.

What does work, then? While headlines make it sound like it’s a battle to get people out of their home offices (even if the office is a closet), three years of data from Future Forum shows that the vast majority of people want to gather together, anywhere from a few days a week to once a month — but they want that in-office time to be purpose-driven.

So instead of leaning into broad return-to-office (RTO) mandates like requiring everyone to show up at the office three days a week, innovative companies are avoiding a negative employee response by focusing on moments that matter.

These selective moments are built around activities that blend business work with social time. They’re most successful when they’re designed around specific workplace goals and events that include team development, onboarding and training, new-team formation, project kickoffs, and specific times for function-specific roles, such as sales. The benefit? Companies get the upsides of deeper connection and engagement without all the downsides of RTO mandates.

Office Attendance Doesn’t Equal Engagement

To be clear, five days a week in the office isn’t just dead in practice — it’s dying in policy, too: While 49% of U.S. companies had full-time in-office policies in the first quarter of 2023, only 31% did as of the second quarter of 2024, according to Flex Index. (These numbers are, of course, way down from before the pandemic, when an in-office policy was the default almost everywhere.) What’s growing fastest are structured hybrid work programs. The most popular varieties are two-or-three-days-a-week guidelines or policies.

Mandates to be in the office “just because” have faced a lot of employee resistance. Blanket policies increase the risk of losing top talent and a diverse workforce, disproportionately cause women to leave, and negatively impact productivity. We’re seeing that one-size-fits-all approaches don’t work for the majority of teams that are now distributed across cities and even countries, and they don’t fit the distinct team rhythms in realms such as sales, finance, or engineering. As a result, leaders have generally been loath to go hard on enforcement of RTO policies.

Pre-pandemic, designing in-person gatherings that would support both work time and personal connection between colleagues was a challenge for the few teams that were spread out across cities. But remote workers are now the rule, not the exception. Zillow offers a typical example: In 2019, 99% of Zillow employees lived within a 50-mile radius of an office; today, fewer than 50% do. The company is responding to the challenge with its shift to what it calls Cloud HQ. This includes a commitment to come together on occasion as the company embraces dispersed work. As Corina Kolbe, Zillow’s vice president of talent success, put it to me, “If we’re going to be distributed, we will always also prioritize in-person connection.”

Leaders are being forced to grapple with a fundamental question: What’s the purpose of the office, anyway? Employees’ answers tend to be similar regardless of whether the research comes from Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Microsoft, or even real estate companies. For example, in a survey conducted by Cushman & Wakefield covering 2020 to 2022, employees cited socialization, team collaboration, and separating work from home as the top purposes for going to an office.

Successful hybrid leaders creatively craft what happens when employees do come together — making sure that the time includes socialization along with work. I’ve seen this in practice at companies ranging from Allstate to Zillow, across a span of industries.

Moments that matter happen at both the companywide and the team-specific levels. These moments follow tempos that build engagement, reinforce friendships, and inspire employees to dig into projects side by side. To the employees, there are clear reasons to be in the same room.

Four Essential Times for Building Moments That Matter

Companies are thinking closely about how to use in-person time most fruitfully in four broad areas of interaction. Below, I’ll go through each, highlighting some common effective work patterns I’ve seen in my work supporting a range of companies across financial services, defense, retail, and technology.

Team development: Get people together three or four times a year, with a 50-50 mix of business and social.

There’s mounting evidence that having team-level gatherings three or four times a year that blend time for socializing and building relationships and doing deep work are essential for forming deeper connections faster. That means connections both to team members and their work.

There’s clearly something that happens when humans are together for a few days, preferably spending at least half our time socially and getting to know one another through meals, team-building activities, and volunteer opportunities. Such a need is especially strong in organizations where, because of the pandemic, colleagues haven’t spent significant time in each other’s presence. I recall one team member based across the country from the rest of us who was hungry to get us all in the same room. She’d worked remotely in the past, but she’d never been in a situation where she’d spent no regular face-to-face time with her colleagues.

There is deep value in coordinated, collective time. Atlassian has shared internal data showing that employees who meet with their teams in person see a 27% boost in connection that lasts four to five months. That boost is even higher for two key groups: new hires and recent graduates.

Interestingly, and contrary to popular wisdom, sporadic office visits didn’t have the same lasting effect. Harvard Business School professor Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury studied team gatherings at Zapier, a remote-first company, and also found that the connections people made in person persisted unchanged for at least three months. Perhaps more importantly, he found that there was an essential requirement to design for diverse connections. Otherwise, people tended to connect along gender, age, and race. Even something as simple as shifting table setups or orchestrating cab rides can avoid “birds of a feather” flocking together.

Onboarding and training events: Use face-to-face time to get to know people and to build ties across functions.

Onboarding and training events provide great opportunities to bring people together from across the company to build relationships.

During the pandemic, many companies had to find a way to onboard employees remotely, which drove some much-needed improvements. For instance, many organizations moved the administrative aspects of a new job to something that employees could do asynchronously, such as getting paperwork done and laptops set up.

What remains, though, are interactions that can be done virtually but are disproportionately beneficial when they happen in person. There are often different in-person requirements for young, new hires during “proving out” periods. For instance, entry-level claims agents at Allstate have in-person training and work together in person while they’re learning the ropes. Then, after a couple of months, they can work from anywhere. Microsoft has found that when new hires spend a few days with their managers and teams, it drives higher satisfaction and deeper engagement. Managers, too, have said that they take a more active role in the development of new hires on their teams by meeting with them in person at least a couple of days a month.

More organizations are bringing new hires into fewer locations, especially in the case of recent graduates. For example, some companies will hire senior engineers to work anywhere but will hire people for entry-level engineering roles in just a handful of locations, even offering to pay for relocation costs. This rather old-school practice is designed to give these new hires more in-person networks and proximity to managers.

Ongoing virtual training can certainly be done successfully and provides an episodic opportunity to bring together people who have common levels of experience but often work on different teams. Holding training events in person, however, can help build even stronger weak ties — the casual connections that make every company thrive.

New-team formation and major-initiative kickoffs: Grapple together over the objectives and norms of a project.

In many organizations, major initiatives involve product development and go-to-market resources. A core group within a cross-functional team may include product managers, marketers, designers, and engineers to build the next big product launch, or the designers, communication specialists, marketers, and analytics teams to develop the next big marketing campaign.

Initiatives like these benefit from bringing teams of people together in person not just to drive a deeper understanding of the goals of a project but to build trust among team members. This is a time to talk through whether those goals align with the function’s priorities and to build social connections while having meals together. It’s a good way to focus on the operating norms of a project, such as making simple but important decisions about what tools the team will use to communicate and who will be responsible for driving updates.

Major-milestone reviews are another obvious reason to bring teams back together in person for a few days. Best practices involve combining both product and go-to-market function milestones so that everyone across functions gets exposure to both — with social activities built in. These could include having meals together or participating in offsite team-building events, such as an outdoor walk-and-talk in pairs (switching up partners every 15 minutes), taking a quirky city tour, or cleaning up a public garden as a volunteer project.

Business-function-specific activities: Let teams figure out the best in-person schedules for their needs.

The patterns of what interactions work best in person vary across both organizations and functions. Every business function likely has its own key times when being in the same room is more meaningful. For example, the finance team may gather for the monthly and quarterly close of the books. Regional sales teams may have weekly anchor days for practicing pitches. Members of the legal team who work on commercial deals may come together with the sales team during the last five days of each sales quarter. Roles that are more of what I call the “glue layer” of a company — including product management, product marketing, and program management — all tend to need more in-person time with their teams.

Discovering the best moments for deep collaboration — where the purpose behind coming together in person is clear — takes effort by leaders and teams. In its research, BCG found that teams who set their norms together were much more likely to feel productive as well as engaged compared with teams where the boss set the norms or people were left to figure them out individually.

Bringing distributed teams together drives important bonds and works best if leaders focus on moments that matter. What was once the minority — teams spread across geographies — is now the majority. The opportunity in front of all of us is to rethink how offices can become collaboration hubs. Leaders need to better imagine how we’ll support teams and functions to figure out what their own moments that matter look like. As we do so, we’ll solve for connection and engagement for the entire organization.

“The MIT Sloan Management Review is a research-based magazine and digital platform for business executives published at the MIT Sloan School of Management.”

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