The Real Cost of Getting Hybrid Work Wrong
I’ve managed distributed teams across the U.S., India, and the Philippines for over a decade. So when the post-pandemic “return to office” debates started, I watched with a mix of amusement and frustration. Amusement because most of the loudest voices had clearly never run a real distributed operation. Frustration because the conversation kept missing the point.
The question was never “remote or office.” The question was always: does your organization know how to operate when people aren’t in the same room? And for most companies, the honest answer is no — not because remote work doesn’t work, but because they never bothered to design for it.
What “getting it wrong” actually costs
The costs aren’t abstract. I’ve seen them up close.
A team in Manila that was consistently left out of planning sessions because the meetings were scheduled for U.S. convenience. They delivered work that was technically correct but strategically misaligned — not because they lacked skill, but because nobody gave them the context. Three months of rework on a major initiative. That’s the cost.
A director in the U.S. who flagged burnout across her team six weeks before two of her best people quit. She’d raised it in multiple syncs. The response from above was “we’ll revisit the workload after Q4.” Q4 came and went. The people didn’t. Replacing them took five months and cost significantly more than the workload adjustment would have. That’s the cost.
A hybrid policy that required three days in office, applied uniformly across roles that had no operational need for it. The highest-performing individual contributor on my team — fully remote, consistently top of every metric — was told to relocate or resign. She resigned. A decade of institutional knowledge, gone, because someone in HR wanted a clean policy. That’s the cost.
None of these were remote work failures. They were leadership failures dressed up as flexibility debates.
The proximity bias problem
Here’s something I’ve learned the hard way: if you run a hybrid team and you’re not actively fighting proximity bias, you’re rewarding it.
The people who happen to be in the room when a decision gets made have an unfair advantage. Not because they’re better — because they’re visible. They get the side conversations, the context that doesn’t make it into the meeting notes, the casual “hey, what do you think about…” that shapes direction before anything formal happens.
Your remote team members don’t get any of that. And over time, the gap shows up in everything — who gets the stretch assignments, who gets promoted, whose ideas get heard.
I’ve had to build deliberate countermeasures for this. Rotating who leads meetings. Making sure key decisions are documented and shared asynchronously before they’re finalized. Asking remote team members for input first in calls, before the room takes over. It’s not natural. It requires constant attention. But if you don’t do it, you’ll slowly build a two-tier organization and then wonder why your remote talent keeps leaving.
Clarity is the whole game
Every hybrid failure I’ve seen traces back to the same root cause: ambiguity.
Ambiguity about when people need to be available. Ambiguity about how decisions get made when half the team is remote. Ambiguity about what “flexible” actually means — which, in most companies, means “flexible until your manager decides it isn’t.” Ambiguity about how performance is measured when you can’t see someone at their desk.
The organizations that make hybrid work aren’t the ones with the most progressive policies. They’re the ones that have done the unglamorous work of defining expectations clearly enough that a new hire in another time zone can understand how things operate without needing to absorb it through osmosis.
That means written communication norms. Defined response-time expectations. Clear escalation paths. Documented decision-making processes. It’s boring operational work, and it’s the difference between a hybrid team that functions and one that’s just a distributed mess pretending to be flexible.
The manager is the bottleneck
I’ve said this enough times that my leadership team can probably recite it: hybrid work is a management problem, not a policy problem.
You can write the most thoughtful hybrid policy in the world, and a bad manager will destroy it in a week. A manager who schedules all-hands at 9am Eastern and doesn’t think about the team in Manila. A manager who equates “online status” with “working.” A manager who gives the interesting projects to the people they see in the hallway.
Conversely, a strong manager can make almost any arrangement work. I’ve had managers on my team who ran high-performing groups split across three continents with zero drama — because they designed their operating rhythm intentionally, communicated relentlessly, and treated every team member as equally present regardless of location.
If you want to fix your hybrid strategy, stop rewriting the policy and start developing your managers. Train them on asynchronous communication. Teach them how to run inclusive meetings. Give them the tools to measure output instead of activity. That’s where the leverage is.
The real question
The companies that will win the next decade of talent competition aren’t the ones offering the most remote days. They’re the ones where it genuinely doesn’t matter where you sit — because the systems, the culture, and the leadership are designed to work regardless.
That’s hard to build. It requires operational discipline, honest self-assessment, and a willingness to rethink assumptions that most leaders don’t even realize they’re carrying.
But the cost of not building it? I’ve seen it. It’s your best people walking out the door, your distributed teams slowly disengaging, and your organization performing below its potential — all while congratulating itself on having a hybrid policy.
— Bruno