Team coordination in hybrid work comes down to one practical question: how do you get the right people in on the same days, and give them the right space when they arrive? People no longer come in because they must be at a desk before the day starts. They come in to see the people they work with.
When they arrive and those people are not there, the commute feels wasted and the next visit gets harder to justify. Kadence has approached this problem from several angles since 2021, including shared schedules, recurring team days, workplace events, flexible workspace, meeting-room hardware and language support. The dated examples below show what each approach adds and where it fits.
What is team coordination in hybrid work?
Team coordination in hybrid work is the job of getting the right people in the same place at the same time when nobody has a fixed desk or a fixed schedule. It covers who needs to meet, how often, and where. Without it, people come in on different days and in-office time loses its value.
Kadence’s co-founder Dan Bladen, framed the problem this way when Kadence and LiquidSpace announced their partnership in 2023: “In the past people were predictable, and spaces were static. Now, spaces are flexible, and people are unpredictable.” (Kadence and LiquidSpace partnership announcement)
When Kadence introduced Team Kadences for team coordination in 2023, it made the same point. With each person getting their best work done on their own terms, wider teams can struggle for rhythm, and the performance of a company depends on the productivity of its teams.
Jeff Gwinnett, Senior Director, Workplace Experience & Sustainability at Softchoice, described the challenge in the 2023 LiquidSpace announcement: “The future of work is one where people have the agency to choose where and how they work so they can be the most productive in what they deliver. This means work can happen anywhere, and with the right people. The challenge then comes down to coordination – the coordination of schedules, spaces, and experiences.”
Before choosing any tool, answer three questions:
- Who needs to be together? A project team, a department, a cross-functional group or the whole company.
- How often? Every week, every month or around specific moments such as a launch or a town hall.
- Where? Headquarters, a regional office or a space near where people live.
How do people see who is coming in?
People see who is coming in when colleagues’ plans are visible where they book. That means profiles with faces, a shared weekly working pattern, and alerts when key teammates book. Visibility is the first layer of coordination, because people cannot plan to meet if they cannot see each other’s plans.
In September 2021, Kadence added headshots, recurring booking and web profiles. Headshots let employees upload a profile picture and see colleagues’ faces on the floor plan while booking. The stated aim was community building, visibility and transparency, especially for teammates who had never met. The web profile carried a user’s notification preferences and preferred office and floor across devices, so available space options were filled in for each new booking.
In January 2022, Kadence introduced Personal Kadence, a way for each person to plot their weekly working pattern and share it with colleagues. The launch walked users through six steps:
- Set up a profile with a bio, city, time zone and workspace preferences.
- Plot a weekly Kadence so colleagues know where you will work.
- Find a colleague from the Teams tab.
- View their profile, including workplace preferences, bookings and weekly Kadence.
- Pick a day they are in and book a space near them on the interactive floor plan.
- Set a weekly rhythm by aligning your Kadence with theirs and repeating bookings.
The announcement named three benefits: collaborating at the right time by coordinating schedules, better performance by letting employees choose where and when they work best, and better advance planning from understanding employee habits and space utilization. At launch it was free to everyone who used Kadence.
Visibility also works in the other direction. In February 2024, Kadence described letting people follow favorite teammates, get alerts when those teammates booked or canceled, and receive smart booking suggestions so they did not miss a chance to meet face to face. These capabilities sit under Kadence’s approach to people coordination.
How do you get teams in on the same days?
You get teams in on the same days by agreeing recurring team days, anchoring them to a place, and prompting people to book when those days come round. Individual schedules rarely line up on their own. A manager-owned, recurring in-office day gives the whole team one clear answer to the question of when to come in.
The first step was recurring booking, added in September 2021. A person could book specific days of the week on a recurring basis, for themselves or on behalf of others in the team. The example given was bringing a team in on a Tuesday and Thursday every week for 2 months to work on a project. Users set a start and end date, Kadence found available desks to choose from, any conflicts were displayed, and parking could be added to the booking.
In September 2023, Team Kadences moved the decision to the team manager. Managers could:
- Schedule in-office days for the team based on colleagues’ availability and preferences.
- Set recurring team days every week or month, and choose when they would begin.
- Choose a location and neighborhood suited to the team.
Once team days were set, team members received Smart Suggestions on their User Homepage Schedule telling them it was a team day, so they could book their space for that week and day. The announcement also argued that fixed days for team office attendance help space planning, because the physical workspace is not used inefficiently.
Three practical lessons follow from these examples:
- Let managers own team days. Individual rhythms rarely line up on their own.
- Anchor the day to a place. A neighborhood gives the team somewhere to sit together, not just the same building.
- Put the prompt where people plan. A suggestion in the booking flow is harder to miss than a calendar note.
What makes an in-office day worth the commute?
An in-office day is worth the commute when the time together is intentional: the right people are there, and there is a reason to gather beyond desk work. Workplace events, town halls and social moments supply that reason. They also build the connection that company culture in hybrid work depends on.
Dave Cairns, Kadence’s Future of Work Strategist, wrote about this in October 2024 after hosting a customer and partner dinner in London, in a piece on creating moments that matter. His view: “In an increasingly distributed world of work, in-person events and live, unstructured conversations are vital to a degree that I can’t quantify with words.” He argued that people do not need to be together every day, but they do need to be more intentional. For him, the value of meeting was less about whiteboarding, water cooler chats or working shoulder to shoulder. It was more about sharing who we are as people and getting aligned on the future we want to create. At the dinner he used conversation cards with a simple rule: if you draw a blank, or are not comfortable answering, pick another card.
In July 2024, Kadence introduced Kadence Events to unify teams and company culture. The launch described four main uses:
- One place to plan. Create an event with details such as dietary requirements and a Google Maps location, invite team members and external guests, and collect accepted invites in one place instead of spreadsheets, docs and long email threads.
- Reach people where they read. Send invitations and announcements through Slack, Microsoft Teams, email or the Kadence app.
- Connection outside work. Browse a catalog of what is happening near a location, from 5-a-side soccer to a chess club or a wellness seminar.
- Measure what worked. Run feedback polls after each event and use Events Analytics to see how many people attended in person or online.
The announcement gave everyday examples: a charity donut sale, a weekly team check-in with drinks and a poll on the best nearby spots, or a company offsite with seminars, updates and presentations. It also made the case that cohesive, aligned teams collaborate more effectively, share knowledge and support each other, which it linked to higher employee satisfaction and retention. More on workplace events.
The lesson for leaders: treat events as part of the coordination plan, not an extra. A team day with a town hall or a lunch club attached is easier to justify than a day of video calls from a different desk.
How can distributed teams meet without a nearby office?
Distributed teams can meet without a nearby office by booking flexible workspace on demand, close to where team members live. Coworking desks and meeting rooms booked alongside company-owned space let a team gather locally. Usage data then shows which locations earn their cost and which permanent space the company may no longer need.
In May 2023, Kadence and LiquidSpace announced a partnership. The announcement described LiquidSpace as the largest global on-demand office marketplace and set out three aims:
- Instantly book on-demand desks, meeting rooms and offices at coworking spaces and flexible office providers around the world.
- Help teams coordinate and meet up in person, at the office or in coworking spaces.
- Reduce cost per employee by optimizing the mix of traditional and on-demand real estate spend.
It said the full integration would launch in Q3. It spoke to two groups: “officeless” companies coordinating employee schedules across thousands of flexible work spaces, and companies with their own offices that wanted to give employees access to locations beyond their own four walls.
In February 2024, Kadence announced Kadence Flex for booking flexible workspace, built with LiquidSpace. The launch described:
- Booking hot desks and meeting rooms in thousands of flexible work locations worldwide, by the hour, short term or long term, as one-off or recurring bookings.
- Choosing between company-owned and on-demand flex spaces in the same booking flow.
- Controlling flex-space budgets across departments and choosing locations by cost and proximity to central offices.
- Seeing where teammates planned to work, in the office or a flexible workspace, and setting team days at either.
- Data on which offices and flex spaces teams used most, to inform decisions on whether to cut real estate or invest more in certain locations.
A companion piece the same month, Kadence x LiquidSpace: a new era of flexible working, framed the integration for distributed teams. Teams spread around the globe could meet locally, and managers could use metrics on how often office and flexible spaces were used and how well they were attended to downsize permanent space and cut unnecessary office leases. More on flexible office space.
The practical point: flexible workspace is a coordination tool, not only a real estate one. If team days can happen in a space near the team, the reason to meet stays and the long commute goes.
How do you remove friction in meeting rooms and across regions?
Remove friction by making meeting rooms easy to check and book from the room itself, and by giving every employee the software in their own language. Both problems are small on their own. Left unsolved, they undo good planning: meetings collide, and regional teams stop using the shared tools.
Meeting rooms that show their status
In September 2024, Kadence announced a partnership with Neat that integrated Kadence room booking with Neat’s App Hub. The announcement described checking meeting room availability, amenities and capacity in one place without switching between calendar systems, booking rooms instantly, starting or ending meetings from the room, and making room status visible to prevent booking conflicts. Dan Bladen said the goal was “an integrated solution that makes collaboration easier, smarter, and more intuitive.”
Language that matches the workforce
In June 2025, Kadence expanded support for global teams to 38 languages. The announcement explained why this matters for coordination at scale. Language friction slows adoption. Employees delay onboarding, support tickets spike from simple issues, regional teams turn to spreadsheets or legacy tools, and critical data becomes fragmented across offices. When that happens, shared schedules and team days only work for part of the company.
The announcement described language preferences set at the user level with no additional setup, localization across desktop, mobile, notifications and in-app messages, and AI-powered updates so new features reached every language at the same time. More on multi-language support.
Where should leaders start?
Leaders should start by defining who needs to meet and how often, then build up in layers: visible schedules, recurring team days, a purpose for each day, flexible space where there is no office, and fewer barriers on the day. Each layer depends on the one before it, so the order matters more than any single tool.
- Define who needs to meet and how often. Start from teams and projects, not from desks.
- Make plans visible. Profiles, faces on the floor plan and shared weekly schedules let people find each other.
- Set team days. Let managers fix a recurring day, place and neighborhood, and prompt people when they book.
- Give the day a purpose. Attach workplace events, town halls or social moments, and ask for feedback afterward.
- Meet where people are. Where there is no office nearby, use flexible workspace and track which locations get used.
- Remove friction. Make meeting rooms easy to book on the spot, and make sure every region can use the tools in its own language.
Each step answers the same question from a different angle: are the right people in the same place at the same time, with space that works for them? When the answer is yes, coming in is worth the commute.