A hybrid work model splits the working week between the office and remote settings such as home. Getting it right takes more than an attendance rule. It shapes how teams coordinate, how leaders use space and how people with very different working styles and lives do their best work.
This guide brings together Kadence research, customer examples, webinars and practical playbooks published between 2021 and 2025. The hybrid debate has moved quickly in that time, so findings below are dated where the timing matters.
What is hybrid work?
Hybrid work is a model where employees split their time between remote settings, such as home, and the office or other locations. A hybrid work model gives people flexibility about where and when they work: focused tasks often happen remotely, while collaboration, brainstorming and connection happen in the office.
As Kadence’s explainer on whether hybrid working makes a difference put it in March 2024, hybrid does not force a choice between office and remote. Employees choose based on the task at hand. A fixed location can be demotivating, and working only from home can be isolating. Hybrid balances autonomy with collaboration.
The scale is significant, but access is uneven. Figures gathered in Kadence’s September 2025 overview of what hybrid work is and why it matters show the pattern:
- In the US, 43.6% of workers aged 25+ with advanced degrees teleworked in early 2024, compared with only 3.5% of those without a high school diploma.
- Around 31% of new senior-level postings offered hybrid options in 2025.
- In Great Britain, 28% of working adults were hybrid workers in early 2025. 14% worked fully remotely, while 44% still commuted to the office every day.
- Workers with a degree were around ten times more likely to work hybrid than those with no qualifications, and around 45% of those earning £50,000 or more were hybrid.
That unevenness creates real problems. Planned office days are wasted when colleagues miss each other. Frontline and part-time staff risk being left behind. Offices sit empty on some days and overcrowded on others, and leaders lose sight of how space is used. Mandating days in the office does not address alignment, equity or efficiency.
Why does a hybrid work model pay off?
A well-run hybrid work model supports productivity, lowers real estate costs and helps attract and retain talent. A 2024 Stanford University study by Nicholas Bloom found that hybrid workers who work from home two days a week are just as productive as full-time office staff, with about a third fewer resignations.
By 2025, the argument had shifted from employee perk to business performance. In May 2025, Kadence co-founder Dan Bladen argued that hybrid work is every CEO’s best friend because it works for productivity, cost control and long-term resilience. In February 2025, his piece on how companies were optimizing hybrid for performance in 2025 named three levers: collaboration that moves the needle, because random in-office attendance is a drain rather than a strategy; cost efficiency at scale, through right-sized offices and intelligent scheduling; and retention, through balancing autonomy with structured in-office time.
Productivity. The Stanford study by Nicholas Bloom also found higher job satisfaction among hybrid workers. Among those polled on the effectiveness of hybrid work, 61% cited improved productivity, and a Checkr Inc. study cited in what hybrid working is and whether it makes a difference found that 68% of American managers wanted remote work to continue because of its impact on productivity and engagement.
Real estate. Hybrid turns office space into a variable cost. According to CBRE’s 2024 Occupier Sentiment Survey, 60% of enterprise leaders were expecting to reduce their real estate footprint, redesigning space to reflect how work actually happens. With Kadence, Karger reduced office space by 80% after discovering occupancy consistently remained at 30-40%, enabling a move down to 1.5 floors. Five Good Friends cut office costs by 15%. More examples sit in Kadence’s customer case studies.
Talent. A McKinsey report found that 87% of employees offered flexible work take advantage of it. Data cited in December 2024 in crafting a hybrid policy showed that 82% of employees prefer roles with hybrid options and 51% would consider leaving their job if hybrid flexibility was taken away. Hybrid roles also reach people who would not relocate, such as those with established roots or family responsibilities.
What are the main hybrid work models?
Most hybrid work models sit on a spectrum from office-first to remote-first. Common examples include coordinated anchor days, where teams share 2–3 set office days per week; manager-led flexibility with no global mandate; hub-and-spoke offices; and remote-first setups built on bookable shared desks. The right model depends on your goals and your people. For a plain definition, see what a hybrid work model is.
These hybrid work model examples come from organizations and frameworks Kadence has covered:
- Coordinated anchor days. Anchor days are set days when a team comes into the office together. Kadence’s December 2024 policy framework recommends 2–3 anchor days per week for collaboration and team-building, with flexible days for the rest of the week.
- Manager-led flexibility. At a January 2025 Kadence Connect webinar on whether hybrid strategies would work in 2025, David Music and Nick Mann of Willis Towers Watson (WTW) explained that WTW has no global mandate on office attendance. Team leaders decide when presence is needed based on project needs, and each office adapts to local norms. WTW introduced Kadence as an optional tool for employees to show when they will be in, chosen for its simplicity and its Microsoft Teams integration.
- Hub and spoke. In August 2021, Kadence noted that companies such as Fujitsu were setting up hub and spoke models, with a slimmed down HQ and satellite offices in urban areas or close to train stations.
- Remote-first with desk hoteling. Desk hoteling means booking a shared desk for the days you are in rather than owning one. In 2021, Kadence expected many remote-first companies to adopt it and repurpose office space for collaboration and meetings.
- A mix of shared and permanent desks. Offices can combine bookable desks with a set-aside area of permanent desks for people who want to be in full time.
- Fixed attendance mandates. Leadership sets a number of days, such as three a week. As the next section shows, mandates that managers will not enforce tend to break down.
How do you write a hybrid work policy?
Write a hybrid work policy as a living strategy, not a list of rules. Start with the business goals it serves, ask employees what they need, coordinate in-office time, give people the right tools and launch it clearly. Then make sure managers apply it consistently, or it will quietly break down.
Kadence’s guide to crafting a hybrid policy for 2025, published in December 2024, describes a good policy as a company-wide strategy that aligns with business objectives, supports collaboration, flexibility and wellbeing, and evolves with data and feedback.
Start with the why and ask your people
Common objectives are talent retention and attraction, better in-person collaboration and cost efficiency. Then ask employees through surveys, cross-functional focus groups and one-on-one conversations with team leaders. Summarize the feedback into themes, such as “employees want flexibility on Mondays and Fridays”, and let those themes shape the policy.
Coordinate office time
Economist Nick Bloom emphasizes the importance of coordination. Hybrid often fails through misalignment: people come to the office and find half their team working remotely. Pair anchor days with flexible days, and make sure everyone understands the purpose of anchor days and what is expected.
Give people tools they will use
Back the policy with scheduling for desks, rooms and teams, collaboration software, project management platforms and workplace analytics. Adoption is often the biggest hurdle, so bring booking into the tools people already use, such as Microsoft Teams and Slack, through workplace integrations. Support it with onboarding sessions, video tutorials and ongoing help.
Launch it like a product
Hold an all-hands meeting that explains why the policy exists, what employees can expect and how success will be measured. Create a central hub for FAQs, tool guides and updates. Train managers to lead the transition, and build in two-way feedback through quarterly surveys, listening sessions and anonymized suggestion boxes.
Avoid hushed hybrid
Hushed hybrid is a quiet agreement between employees and managers to ignore a formal return-to-office mandate. In April 2025, Kadence explained how hushed hybrid hurts businesses. Leadership demands, say, three days a week. Frontline managers know enforcing it is more trouble than it is worth, so they give a quiet nod to once or twice. On paper, the company enforces a mandate. In practice, it is bypassed.
Managers do this to retain talent and protect morale. The cost is a fragmented experience that lacks clarity and fairness. According to a Gartner survey, 77% of hybrid workers reported that inconsistent messaging from leadership increased stress and reduced morale. A 2025 survey found that nearly half of UK hybrid workers would quit if forced back to the office full-time, unless they received a significant pay increase.
The fix is intentional flexibility. Build the policy around team workflows, give employees and managers visibility into who plans to be in, focus office time on collaboration, onboarding and high-impact work, and adapt to how space is actually used. As the March 2024 explainer argued, trust matters more than mandates: offices with good resources, breakout spaces and equipped meeting rooms give people their own reasons to come in.
How do you design for different working styles?
Design for different working styles by matching the office to the work people do there and by planning for different personas. Focused work often suits home, so the office should serve meetings, collaboration and connection. A healthy hybrid workplace culture keeps remote-leaning people connected and gives office-loving people the stability they want.
Match the place to the work mode
The Five Gears model and hybrid working, explored by Kadence in January 2022, defines five work modes. Fifth gear is intense focus. Fourth gear is the busy, multitasking day of meetings. Third gear is social. Second gear is connect mode, where colleagues build relational depth. First gear is recharge mode, with reverse as a final gear.
People showed they could work in fifth gear remotely with a reasonable home setup. As the model puts it, you’re not going to commute 1.5 hours to an office to sit and work in fifth gear. They come into the office for gears four, three and two. So the office needs less space for focused work and more for informal meetings and socializing.
Plan for hybrid personas
In 2021, Kadence described four common hybrid personas: the Soloist, the Adapter, the Culturalist and the Traditionalist. Two sit at opposite ends of the spectrum.
The Soloist, profiled in August 2021, is independent, highly productive and happiest working remotely. The risk is isolation and losing touch with company culture. Keep Soloists engaged by using shared channels such as Slack and Asana for everyone, making big announcements over a virtual call so everyone hears at the same time, scheduling a biweekly check-in with day-to-day work off the agenda, and communicating in-person meeting dates in good time. Let them book a desk in advance to remove hot desk anxiety.
The Traditionalist, profiled in October 2021, prefers the office every day, Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, and is likely to resist hybrid most. Offer permanent workstations where space allows, or recurring desk bookings with a system that flags unfulfilled bookings. Give visibility into team schedules so the office feels busy again, and tailor office neighborhoods to teams, such as breakout spaces for marketing and quieter zones for finance.
Include parents, caregivers and people on the move
In June 2023, Dan Bladen wrote about how hybrid work supports happy teams and families. Hybrid recognizes that employees are also parents, partners and caregivers, and lets them handle a school drop-off or a sick child without choosing between family and work. He cited research linking higher family-to-work conflict to lower satisfaction in both professional and personal life.
In February 2022, Kadence shared how workplace flexibility and mobility give people the freedom they want, citing an EY survey that found more than half of employees globally would quit their jobs if not provided with significant flexibility. It told the story of Information Security Manager Josiah Haddleton, who kept his role when he and his wife moved from London back to the US. The best model puts people in the driver’s seat.
How do you run inclusive hybrid meetings?
Run inclusive hybrid meetings by treating remote attendees as equal participants. A hybrid meeting brings together in-person and remote attendees, often over Microsoft Teams or Zoom. Question whether each meeting is needed, share a clear agenda, start on time, structure contributions and use technology that lets everyone take part the same way.
Meeting rooms are far from obsolete. They are becoming hubs that connect remote and in-office colleagues. Kadence’s October 2024 guide to making hybrid meetings more inclusive sets out five practices:
- Consider asynchronous options. Before you schedule, ask whether a few well-timed messages in Slack or Microsoft Teams would do the job.
- Plan with intent. Outline the purpose, the decisions to be made and any pre-reading. Share the agenda in advance and book a room with the right technology for remote attendees.
- Be mindful of timing. Set firm start and end times, add breaks to long sessions and avoid starting late, which leaves remote attendees staring at a screen.
- Create an equal platform. Build structured points where everyone contributes, go around the virtual table and rotate roles such as facilitator and timekeeper.
- Level the field with technology. Use shared digital whiteboards such as Miro instead of a physical whiteboard, and invest in quality microphones and video.
How do you make the office worth the trip?
Make the office worth the trip by designing it for collaboration and connection, and by removing friction from each visit. That means a mix of collaboration, focus and social spaces, easy desk and room booking, and visibility into when colleagues will be in, so fewer people commute to an empty floor.
The idea is not new. In a May 2021 webinar on three steps to a successful hybrid workplace, Dan Bladen, Shaun Ritchie (Co-Founder of Teem) and Neal Piliavin (former Director of Collaboration at HubSpot) discussed Kadence’s return-to-work research. Social interaction with colleagues was the top reason people wanted to return. The panel described the workplace manager’s new job as organizing coincidences, and making each office visit a real occasion with lots of value and minimal friction.
The December 2024 policy guide suggests hot desks for occasional visitors, collaboration zones, focus areas, social spaces and wellness rooms. Support them with desk booking, meeting rooms with reliable video and audio, bookable phone booths, pods and lockers, and automatic check-in through office wifi or badging to show how space is used. Social events count too: WTW used Kadence to coordinate after-work events, because social interaction remained a key driver of attendance.
Much of this work lands with office managers. An office manager’s companion guide for hybrid work, published in March 2024, describes a role that now tailors the office for in-office and remote workers, specifies desk and room booking requirements and champions adoption. Before choosing tools, it recommends assessing how the space is used day to day, gathering input from across departments, including which hybrid personas are present, and setting clear objectives. When selecting desk booking software, work with IT on integration and security, especially how bookings fit into Slack, Microsoft Teams or Google Workspace. Look for usable design on desktop and mobile, full data on space use, support for regular team bookings and neighborhoods, and a platform that can change as teams grow.
How do you know if your hybrid strategy is working?
You know a hybrid strategy is working when it meets the goals you set for it. Track retention and engagement for talent, space utilization and team day attendance for collaboration, and occupancy against capacity for cost. Combine that data with employee feedback and review it quarterly or biannually.
| Goal | What to track |
|---|---|
| Talent retention and attraction | Retention rates and employee engagement scores (eNPS) |
| Collaboration | Space utilization patterns and team day attendance |
| Cost efficiency | Occupancy against capacity, and operational savings such as energy and cleaning |
Workplace analytics that track office usage and meeting attendance show what is happening. Surveys and conversations explain why. Make short-term fixes, such as addressing low attendance on anchor days, and use long-term measures to confirm the policy still meets its original goals. Treat changes as improvements based on data and employee input, not failures of the original plan, and explain what is changing and why.
WTW’s David Music offered similar advice in January 2025: there are no easy answers, so understand how people actually work, keep measuring and adjusting, and balance business needs with what makes people most productive. Hybrid work done well is not self-managing. It needs coordination, clarity and a clear purpose for time together.