Four years since the start of the pandemic, organisations are more used to hybrid working. But as debates continue about on site versus remote, how does location impact workplace culture? In an extract from his new book, Making Hybrid Working Work, Gary Cookson considers the arguments.
Despite a number of dissenting calls for employees to return to the office full time, hybrid working remains popular.
Very few people want to remain fully remote, but very few want to be fully onsite either. Research by Unispace found three main reasons for this, suggesting it is a mix of not wanting to spend time commuting, not wanting to spend money commuting, or working onsite, and not really seeing what point there is in being onsite when their work can be done remotely. It is this final point that organisations really must think about.
Hybrid working
This all comes back to the importance of organisational culture. There is no universally agreed definition of organisational culture and yet almost all people will know what we mean when we talk about it. It is all the things that make a place unique.
We often think of a common understanding of behaviours, mindsets, interactions, decisions and more. Culture matters so much that various sources estimate around 70% of organisational change initiatives fail due to a lack of understanding of organisational culture. But does hybrid working affect this?
Kill or cure culture?
Chris Herd, founder of collaboration tool FirstBase, has said that “distributed work doesn’t kill culture, it reveals it”. This explains to some extent why as many as two-thirds of organisations struggle to maintain morale and culture thanks to remote and hybrid working.
Hybrid working holds up a mirror to organisational culture. Left to chance, the glare from that reflection will erode culture, but the beauty of the reflection is that it shows you what areas need work, what areas are working well and where the blind spots might be.
For this reason, organisations and leaders must establish a clear purpose to the onsite elements of hybrid working. They must prioritise and focus on in-person collaboration, socialisation opportunities and other things that can be difficult to achieve when working remotely.
This means rethinking the physical space to make these things more naturally occurring, and experiment with different ways of bringing people together to find something that works for all concerned. Otherwise, hybrid working can and will erode organisational culture – at least for the whole organisation, but not necessarily for each team.
Team dynamics
As relationships with immediate team members really matter to remote and hybrid workers, these should be a priority, but we must also guard against the risk that each team becomes siloed from the rest of the organisation.
This could happen with each team being given licence to work out the best way of hybrid working for its team members and the best culture it needs to enable the best from its team members.
The danger, therefore, is that each team culture becomes so dominant within that team that it precludes any awareness or conscious mirroring of organisational culture.
And while organisations are, of course, conglomerations of teams with different characteristics, the organisation itself must still have a culture otherwise it may as well not exist.
Consciously co-locating individual workers alongside those from other teams on their onsite days is one thing that could help, as opposed to bringing whole teams onsite to sit together on their onsite days.
Is culture linked to being onsite?
To answer this question, we could start by examining the role that a physical workplace can play in creating and revealing organisational culture.
There are many organisations who have deliberately created bright, vibrant, and varied workplaces even prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, and who see these workplaces as an embodiment of their culture.
The physical workplace clearly is a critical asset, and most businesses own or lease one that suits the needs they had when they set it up. But in almost all cases, this was prior to the mass increase in remote and hybrid working.
And although culture can be represented in the style, layout and overall look and feel of a physical building, it is not confined to that building. It never has been, and never could be.
What physical workplaces do achieve though is ensuring that employees feel connected to the wider purpose and values of the organisation, and to each other, by deliberately creating an environment in which these things are visible, encouraged, and hard to ignore.
That again though is not unique to the physical workplace – the ability to do those things isn’t confined to having a specific location that embodies it.
Different place, same culture
But for many other organisations who have not consciously designed a workplace that embodies their culture, they may find that mandating employees back onsite for part or all their time is not going to solve any cultural issues. It may simply move them to a different place.
Making Hybrid Working Work – A practical guide for business success is published on 3 January 2025.
Research from the University of Leeds, for example, showed that its office was still being used for solo work, with perhaps 60% of tasks being individual-focused and only 20% requiring in-person interactions.
Organisations must look at the balance of tasks an individual needs to undertake before looking at what % of their time they could and should spend onsite.
There are significant benefits to be reaped from having some onsite presence though. Leeds’ research suggested that this improved connections between employees, and helps build a stronger social network, but notably only significantly for people whose jobs require such things, as it supports an improved information flow and informal collaboration.
To make this work regardless of job we perhaps need to revisit the success that many leaders and teams had during the enforced Covid-19 lockdowns, where check-ins on a social level and team bonding were given a higher priority and worked because of that.
That was almost entirely virtual and happened without a fixed physical location, showing that although a fixed physical location can be helpful for such benefits, they can be achieved virtually too.
Don’t leave culture to chance
But what does properly mean? If the number of days on site doesn’t appear to be a major factor, what is? There are many organisations that have only ever been 100% remote, and they have managed to build successful cultures with intentional effort.
To make the most of the onsite space that we have, we must think about how we can encourage people to work strongly and creatively together when at a fixed physical location.
One approach is to co-ordinate the collaborative tasks to be done onsite, leaving the independent tasks to be done remotely.
There are some downsides to being onsite. Many organisations and employees report that onsite working is harmful to productivity if people spend most of their time collaborating, socialising, mentoring and more.
This points to us having to reframe what productivity means but also reach consensus in our organisations about what our onsite physical locations are to be used for.
Onsite has a key role to play, but it is not everything. We can only really leverage the benefits of onsite working if we are intentional about it.
If we leave onsite working to chance, few if any of the benefits will be achieved. We must be intentional about remote working, onsite working, and therefore hybrid working, if we are to create and maintain the culture we want our organisations to have.
This edited chapter from Making Hybrid Working Work by Gary Cookson © 2025 is reproduced with permission from Kogan Page Ltd.
Sign up to our weekly round-up of HR news and guidance
Receive the Personnel Today Direct e-newsletter every Wednesday
