Five Hybrid Work Trends to Watch in 2025

Just a few months ago, many people thought the battles over the value of the hybrid work model — and, on the flip side, return-to-office (RTO) mandates — were finally dying down. Two-thirds of U.S. companies had settled into a flexible work policy, according to Flex Index data on 13,000 companies. Office attendance, measured by building occupancy data, had stabilized at around 50% of pre-pandemic norms for almost two years. Then Amazon CEO Andy Jassy pushed the topic of RTO mandates back into prominence, pressing the company’s workers to get back to their offices five days a week.

Next, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and coleader of a proposed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the upcoming Trump administration, joined in: He has raised the potential of requiring the entire U.S. federal workforce to work in-office full-time.

It’s doubtful that the issue of what’s “right” when it comes to workplace flexibility will get settled anytime soon. While the latest research shows that RTO mandates often backfire, the hybrid work debates will continue. As we look forward to 2025, leaders can also expect continued evolution and refinement of hybrid work models. Here are the hybrid work trends that I’ll be watching — and you should too.

1. Organizations that embrace flexible work will steal talent from organizations that impose harsh return-to-office mandates.

Headlines continue to be dominated by extremes, like the RTO pressure coming from Jassy and Musk. But there are a number of CEOs in the background who are silently (or not so silently) cheering. I see them as the quiet magnets happily plucking talent from the loud voices who are braying that employees “aren’t really working.”

Losing people is openly part of the intention behind Musk and DOGE coleader Vivek Ramaswamy’s vision; the mandate “would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” they wrote last month. Their clear statements match the trendlines seen in big technology companies, where harsher RTO mandates tend to follow sizable layoffs. It’s clear that many companies want to shed workers, but they’re likely losing the wrong ones. Sometimes real estate costs figure into CEOs’ return-to-office decisions — an example of the sunk cost fallacy.

I’ve talked with a number of leaders who set their hybrid policies two or three years ago, haven’t changed their minds, and are happily recruiting talented people from Amazon, Dell, and other businesses that have shifted the ground beneath their workers’ feet. Research over the past year shows that RTO mandates lead to brain drain, driving out top talent, and particularly women, given high childcare costs in the U.S. Talented women who are just as ambitious as their male counterparts but need flexibility are ripe for the picking by organizations looking to bring in high performers.

If the economy continues to improve, the battle for strong employees will resume again. Demographic trends aren’t in companies’ favor as populations continue to age and immigration gets stifled. Organizations that take flexible hybrid work approaches will get better access to more talent.

2. Forward-looking organizations will shift toward measuring performance based on results, not attendance.

As London Business School’s Lynda Gratton noted earlier this year, executives’ perception of productivity can vary widely, and measurement is extremely complex. Too often, flexible work policies are set without first deeply analyzing any of the indicators of productivity or outcomes. The internal data that’s needed is siloed off across real estate and within groups as varied as workplace teams (which hold attendance data), human resources (whose systems track performance ratings, promotions, and attrition), and functional systems (which store elements such as sales team performance). Increasingly, organizations that want to get the balance right will need to invest in tools that drive insights into specific functions, levels, and locations.

The bigger shift many are making is one that should have happened decades ago: the move to managing performance based on results. Whether it’s KPIs, MBOs or OKRs (that is, key performance indicators, management by objectives, or objectives and key results), systems that articulate and measure performance at the organization, function, and team level create a massive opportunity. Leaders can step back from “management by walking around” as the default. They can stop monitoring computer activity, a practice that can lead employees to try to game the system (and to wasteful battles, like Wells Fargo’s fight against mouse jigglers).

Businesses like financial services company Synchrony are showing the path forward: moving away from the annual review process to continual coaching and management on the basis of measurable results. The shift to results-driven performance assessment is a massive lever to improve organizational outcomes and to level the playing field for diverse talent.

3. We’ll see the hybrid work conversation shift from days in the office to core hours and focus time.

Many companies are struggling to find the right balance between the time employees spend on their own and the time they spend on team collaboration and meetings. In fact, for many leaders, this is more of a pain point than the question of how many days people should be in the office.

Many teams are distributed across time zones, making collaboration complex. One solution will come from anchoring teams to time zones: declaring that a team must have a “home base” (for example, the U.S. Eastern time zone) and setting core hours during which everyone is expected to be available for meetings, such as 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. ET. That type of commitment is essential because teams need to have regular time to be in flow with each other during the day.

The broader issue is how to find focus time, and it won’t be solved by shoving people back into offices. As automation has advanced, office work has become more complex and interdisciplinary. There also are more meetings: Microsoft, for instance, has seen a 252% rise in time spent in meetings per week post-pandemic — driven, in part, by more of them being hybrid meetings (and therefore accessible to more people) and the 30-minute meeting seeming to be the solution to every collaboration problem. Microsoft certainly isn’t alone in experiencing this new meeting overload.

When companies look at what’s holding their employees back from doing better work, many recognize that a lack of focus time during the workday is a real problem. Author and Georgetown University professor Cal Newport calls this the “deep work” that drives higher-quality outcomes.

The answer doesn’t lie in taking away tools; it comes from leadership investments in getting meetings under control. Shopify’s prohibition on recurring meetings with more than two people and its development of a “meeting cost calculator” are examples of ways to drive improvement. The introduction of no-meetings days is another.

4. Leaders will move away from one-size-fits-all hybrid work policies.

Many of the leaders struggling with hybrid work are finding it challenging because they’ve tried a one-size-fits-all approach in an organization that is incredibly complex. Offering blanket, unfettered individual choice imposes a “collaboration tax” on teams that is too high. But telling everyone to be in the office four days a week falls flat, especially in the majority of teams that are spread out across cities.

Talent strategies and flexible work policies have to align. You can’t unscramble an egg: If you’ve hired gifted people to a broad variety of locations over the past five years, telling them to move to be centralized will result in massive departures. Even setting aside the emotional challenge of uprooting families, nearly 60% of U.S. homeowners have mortgage interest rates below 4%. Eighty percent have rates below 5%. With new mortgage rates around 7% or higher, it’s just not worth it to move and take on much higher housing costs. Employees also say that they’d take a pay cut to preserve their flexibility: In a study out of the U.K., employees calculated the opportunity to work from home to be worth 8% of their wages, on average.

Instead of implementing one-size-fits-all policies, the logical shift is to put decisions about when and why teams come together into the hands of midlevel leaders of functions and teams; companies like Allstate and Cloudflare are already taking this approach. A business’s sales leaders could decide to hire centralized junior salespeople so that they could be together in person three or four days a week, for instance, whereas product development teams spread out across time zones could choose to come together one week a month, with a focus on creating moments that matter.

Discussions about different policies for different groups of employees may sometimes devolve into arguments about fairness, but there are already wide variations in compensation, benefits, and support across various occupations. The right answers come in designing programs that work on a team-by-team basis. This includes offering schedule flexibility for front-line workers.

In 2025, we’ll see companies that focus on developing hybrid work norms at the business function level getting more traction with employees. People will welcome the creation of anchor days and anchor weeks rooted in opportunities for connection versus forced marches to the office only to be on Zoom calls all day.

5. Flexible organizations will become artificial intelligence innovators.

While generative AI and hybrid work might feel like very separate topics, the roots of successful programs are the same for both. Flexible ways of working and GenAI adoption both represent seismic shifts in how people operate. Both are driven by technology advances but require intention and investment for successful deployment. In my work with companies, it’s becoming clear that the attributes of organizations that are successful with flexible work can also drive productive adoption of generative AI.

This matters because many workplace experiments with GenAI are getting a cool reception from employees. Slack has reported that excitement about GenAI dropped from 45% to 36% of employees in the U.S. during a three-month period in 2024. Too often, adaptation has come with a top-down approach that doesn’t work for employees and has contributed to a so-called trough of disillusionment. Upwork found that while 85% of executives are mandating or encouraging the use of GenAI to drive efficiency, 77% of employees feel that the tools have decreased their productivity.

The lack of investment in employee training in generative AI tools and manager training in hybrid work is shockingly similar. Upwork’s data found that in companies that expect the use of AI tools to increase company productivity, just 26% of employees have received training on GenAI tools. A different survey of U.S. leaders found that the same percentage of managers have received training in how to lead distributed or hybrid teams.

CEOs and leaders who are willing to invest in experimentation, manage people on the basis of performance, and trust their employees in one sphere — such as working from home — are more likely to do the same when it comes to approaching the adaptation of GenAI and similar tools.

What’s common to each of these trends is the shift away from an overly simplistic focus on where people work to focusing on how teams work. Many leaders are seeing an advantage in redesigning their approach to focus on outcomes, particularly when it comes to driving engagement in talented teams. Those leaders aren’t stuck in workplace nostalgia (as some CEOs are, according to University of Pittsburgh research). Nor are they trying to do a soft layoff to please Wall Street.

In the long run, those leaders who move work forward by building organizations rooted in trust and focused on performance will outperform those wrestling with their own employees.

“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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