Building Workplace Culture Beyond Zoom
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Building Workplace Culture Beyond Zoom
Remote and hybrid work have transformed not only where people work but also how workplace relationships and organizational cultures develop. Digital tools make it possible for geographically dispersed employees to communicate and collaborate, but communication technology alone does not necessarily create belonging, trust, friendship, or a shared sense of purpose. Strong distributed workplaces therefore require organizations to become more deliberate about the human side of work.
Research and workplace experience suggest that flexibility and strong organizational culture are not inherently incompatible. Remote and hybrid arrangements can provide substantial advantages, including autonomy, flexibility, reduced commuting, and improved work-life balance. At the same time, distributed work can reduce spontaneous conversations, informal information exchange, cross-team relationships, and opportunities for employees to develop personal connections with colleagues.
The challenge is therefore not simply deciding whether employees should work remotely or in an office. Organizations increasingly need to determine which activities are best performed independently, asynchronously, virtually, or face-to-face and then intentionally design workplace practices around those differences.
Remote Work Makes Culture More Intentional
Traditional workplaces often relied on physical proximity to create culture. Employees encountered colleagues in hallways, kitchens, meetings, offices, and informal gatherings. These repeated interactions transmitted organizational norms and created opportunities for relationships to develop without formal planning.
Distributed organizations cannot rely as heavily on these accidental encounters. Values, expectations, communication practices, rituals, and opportunities for social interaction often need to be deliberately created and clearly communicated.
This does not necessarily mean remote organizations have weaker cultures. Instead, culture becomes something that must be consciously designed. Organizations can reinforce shared values through transparency, documentation, recognition, mentoring, collaboration, storytelling, rituals, and opportunities for employees to contribute to the wider community.
Human Connection Beyond Video Meetings
Video conferencing solved an important problem by allowing geographically separated employees to communicate in real time. However, a workplace built primarily around scheduled video meetings can reproduce only part of the social experience of working with other people.
Functional communication and human connection are not identical. Employees may successfully exchange information, complete projects, and attend meetings while still feeling socially disconnected from their colleagues.
Meaningful workplace relationships frequently develop through conversations that are not strictly necessary for completing a task. Informal discussions, mentoring, friendships, shared experiences, recognition, volunteering, interest groups, team activities, and spontaneous exchanges can help employees see one another as people rather than simply as participants in digital workflows.
Organizations building culture beyond Zoom therefore need opportunities for interaction that do not always have a formal work agenda.
Belonging and Workplace Community
Belonging is an important component of workplace culture. Employees generally want to feel that they are valued members of a group and that their contributions matter to colleagues and the larger organization.
Remote and hybrid work can complicate this process because employees have fewer opportunities for spontaneous physical interaction. Some remote workers report difficulties feeling connected to coworkers even while valuing the flexibility provided by working from home.
Organizations can strengthen belonging through meaningful conversations, recognition, inclusive decision-making, employee groups, mentoring, shared activities, and opportunities for informal interaction.
Physical presence alone, however, does not guarantee belonging. Loneliness and social isolation can also occur in traditional offices. The more important question is whether workplaces create relationships and communities in which employees genuinely feel known, respected, and included.
Trust in Distributed Organizations
Trust becomes especially important when managers and employees do not regularly see one another in person. Traditional management practices based heavily on physical visibility can become ineffective or counterproductive in distributed workplaces.
Remote and hybrid organizations can instead establish trust through clear expectations, consistent communication, transparency, feedback, accountability, and evaluation based on meaningful outcomes.
Managers play an especially important role. Regular conversations can help managers understand employees as individuals, identify problems, provide recognition, clarify expectations, and maintain relationships that might otherwise weaken because of physical distance.
Trust also requires psychological safety. Employees need to feel able to ask questions, request help, disagree constructively, experiment, and acknowledge mistakes regardless of whether they work from an office or remotely.
Making In-Person Time Meaningful
The growth of remote work has encouraged organizations to reconsider the purpose of the physical workplace. If employees can perform individual computer-based tasks effectively from home, commuting to an office simply to perform those same tasks may provide limited additional value.
Physical gatherings can instead concentrate on activities where human presence offers particular advantages. These can include brainstorming, mentoring, onboarding, networking, team building, training, difficult conversations, creative collaboration, relationship-building, and social interaction.
Research indicates that face-to-face interaction can provide advantages for some creative and collaborative activities. Purposeful gatherings can also strengthen employees' feelings of connection even when they occur relatively infrequently.
The office can therefore evolve from being the default location for all work into one of several environments available for particular kinds of work and interaction.
Asynchronous Collaboration
Building culture beyond Zoom also means recognizing that collaboration does not always require a meeting.
Asynchronous communication allows employees to exchange information and contribute to projects without requiring everyone to be available simultaneously. Documentation, shared workspaces, written updates, recorded information, and clearly defined handoffs can reduce unnecessary meetings and provide employees with greater control over their schedules.
Reducing meeting overload can also make synchronous interaction more valuable. Real-time conversations can then be reserved for situations where discussion, emotional nuance, rapid feedback, creativity, or interpersonal interaction genuinely benefits from people being present together.
This approach can protect concentration while reducing the expectation that employees remain continuously connected to workplace communication systems.
Preventing Proximity Bias
Hybrid workplaces create a particular risk known as proximity bias. Managers may unintentionally give greater attention, information, recognition, assignments, mentoring, or advancement opportunities to employees they encounter physically more often.
If this occurs, hybrid workplaces can develop separate classes of employees in which office workers have greater access to organizational opportunities than remote colleagues.
Organizations can address proximity bias by evaluating employees according to contributions rather than visibility and deliberately distributing information, recognition, development opportunities, mentoring, and important assignments across locations.
Hybrid meetings also require careful design. When some participants share a physical room while others participate remotely, informal conversations and visual attention can favor those physically present. Inclusive meeting practices should ensure that location does not determine whose ideas are heard.
Coordinating Hybrid Teams
Flexibility does not eliminate the need for coordination. Allowing employees to choose office days independently can undermine some of the benefits of physical attendance if colleagues arrive on different days and rarely encounter the people with whom they need to collaborate.
Organizations can instead coordinate physical attendance around teams, projects, and particular collaborative purposes.
Research on hybrid work suggests that coordination can be especially important for innovation and team cohesion. The central question should therefore be less about how many days employees appear in an office and more about whether employees who need to interact are actually brought together at useful times.
Teams may also benefit from having some authority to establish their own collaboration rhythms rather than following identical organization-wide schedules.
Rebuilding Cross-Team Relationships
Distributed work can strengthen communication among immediate collaborators while weakening relationships across organizational boundaries.
When communication becomes heavily task-oriented, employees may interact primarily with the small group of people required to complete their daily responsibilities. Over time, professional networks can become more siloed.
This can reduce the informal circulation of knowledge and ideas between departments. It may also make it harder for employees to understand the organization beyond their immediate team.
Mentoring programs, cross-functional projects, employee groups, volunteering, networking opportunities, retreats, shared events, and informal communities can help rebuild these broader relationships.
Protecting Well-Being and Work-Life Boundaries
Digital workplaces can unintentionally create expectations of continuous availability. When employees can receive messages and attend meetings from almost anywhere, the boundary between working and personal time can become increasingly difficult to maintain.
Healthy workplace culture therefore requires more than connectivity. Organizations also need norms that protect concentration, rest, personal responsibilities, and employees' ability to disconnect.
Reducing unnecessary meetings and encouraging asynchronous communication can help. Managers can also establish clearer expectations regarding response times and availability rather than allowing constant digital presence to become an informal measure of commitment.
Flexible work is most sustainable when flexibility does not become permanent accessibility.
Shared Experiences and Workplace Relationships
Workplace relationships can be strengthened through activities extending beyond ordinary meetings and project assignments.
Employee volunteering, mentoring, interest groups, retreats, social gatherings, collaborative projects, and other shared experiences can connect people who might otherwise interact only through task-oriented digital communication.
These experiences can be particularly useful in distributed organizations because they create contexts in which employees learn about one another beyond job titles and responsibilities.
Organizations do not necessarily need to reproduce every informal feature of the traditional office. Instead, they can create new rituals and shared experiences appropriate for a workplace in which employees may rarely occupy the same physical location.
Redesigning Management for Distributed Work
Remote and hybrid work place greater responsibility on managers to create clarity, connection, and coordination deliberately.
Managers cannot always rely on observing employees at desks or encountering them informally throughout the day. They need explicit systems for establishing expectations, providing feedback, recognizing accomplishments, resolving misunderstandings, supporting professional development, and maintaining interpersonal relationships.
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Building Culture in Remote and Hybrid Workplaces
| Dropbox Team | Dropbox Blog | January 29, 2026
Dropbox reflects on five years of its Virtual First model, in which remote work is the normal employee experience while purposeful in-person gatherings are used to strengthen relationships and organizational culture. The company argues that flexibility works best when organizations deliberately design opportunities for employees to connect rather than attempting to recreate the traditional office online.
| CIPD | Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development | 2025
This report examines how flexible and hybrid working are reshaping organizational culture, productivity, employee connection, and working practices. It emphasizes that workplace culture increasingly depends on management practices, communication, trust, purpose, and inclusion rather than simply having employees physically present in an office.
| Atlassian | Atlassian | 2025
Atlassian describes methods for connecting distributed teams through shared information, intentional collaboration practices, overlapping working hours, and thoughtfully designed opportunities for employees to meet. The approach treats distributed work as an organizational design problem rather than simply a matter of providing employees with communication software.
| GitLab | GitLab Handbook | 2025
GitLab's extensive guide to remote culture explains how distributed organizations can intentionally create shared values, informal communication, inclusion, trust, and social relationships. Rather than relying on office atmosphere to produce culture automatically, remote organizations must explicitly document and reinforce the behaviors and values they want employees to share.
| Maha Abouelenein | Forbes | May 1, 2025
This article argues that workplace culture can flourish without a traditional office when leaders intentionally build relationships and communication practices. Everyday interactions, feedback, recognition, trust, and the way managers respond to employees become especially important when colleagues do not regularly share a physical workplace.
The Value of Intentional In-Person Connection
| Nicholas Bloom, Ruobing Han, and James Liang | Nature | June 12, 2024
A randomized controlled trial involving more than 1,600 employees found that hybrid working improved job satisfaction and reduced employee turnover without damaging performance. The findings suggest that organizations do not necessarily need full-time office attendance to maintain effective teams, allowing workplace gatherings to focus more intentionally on collaboration, relationships, mentoring, and culture.
| Kristen Wolberg and Atlassian Team Anywhere Lab | Atlassian Community | April 25, 2024
Atlassian describes its Team Anywhere Lab, which studies how distributed employees can collaborate and maintain meaningful connections regardless of location. Its work illustrates how companies can use behavioral research and deliberate workplace practices to replace some of the informal social mechanisms once provided automatically by offices.
| Atlassian Community | Atlassian | January 23, 2024
Atlassian's experience with distributed work indicates that occasional purposeful gatherings can have effects that continue long after employees return home. The company's research found that intentional team gatherings increased employees' feelings of connection, suggesting that relatively infrequent face-to-face interaction can complement rather than replace remote work.
Belonging and Human Connection
Buffer's State of Remote Work documents both the popularity of remote work and its social challenges. While many remote workers report feeling connected to colleagues, loneliness and spending too much time at home remain significant problems, demonstrating why organizations must address employees' social needs alongside productivity and technological concerns.
| Hailley Griffis | Buffer | 2023
Buffer examines the changing difficulties experienced by remote workers, including loneliness, isolation, communication, and the inability to disconnect from work. The findings show that solving the technical problems of remote work does not automatically solve its human problems, making intentional community-building an important organizational responsibility.
| John Rau | Forbes | August 22, 2023
Rather than asking whether remote work inherently damages culture, the article argues that organizations should examine the leadership practices and behaviors producing their culture. Strong cultures can exist across different workplace arrangements when organizations clearly communicate expectations, encourage trust, and intentionally reinforce shared values.
| Ted Kitterman | Great Place To Work | August 15, 2023
This article examines how remote and hybrid workplaces can deliberately rebuild the social relationships that once developed through everyday office interaction. It highlights the importance of giving employees meaningful opportunities to form friendships, communicate informally, collaborate, and develop a sense that they belong to a community rather than simply logging into a workplace platform.
| Kim Parker | Pew Research Center | March 30, 2023
Pew Research Center found that many people working from home believe remote work makes it harder to feel connected with coworkers. At the same time, remote employees often value the work-life balance provided by flexible arrangements, highlighting the challenge organizations face in preserving flexibility while creating opportunities for stronger workplace relationships.
| Ted Kitterman | Great Place To Work | February 24, 2023
Research discussed by Great Place To Work suggests that remote and hybrid employees can experience weaker feelings of belonging and authenticity despite enjoying important benefits from flexible work. Organizations therefore need deliberate strategies for inclusion, trust, recognition, participation, and relationship-building.
Inclusion, Trust, and Team Relationships
Cisco's global hybrid-work research found substantial employee support for flexible working while also identifying gaps in organizational readiness. The report emphasizes that successful hybrid workplaces require cultural and managerial changes in addition to technology, including greater inclusion, trust, communication, and support for employees working from different locations.
| Mark C. Perna | Forbes | October 24, 2022
This article explores the consequences of declining human connection at work, arguing that small interpersonal interactions have an important role in employee engagement and retention. Workplace friendships, personal recognition, and genuine conversations can help create emotional connections that scheduled virtual meetings alone often fail to provide.
| Christopher Atti et al. | arXiv | September 9, 2022
This research examines remote-first workplaces and their effects on productivity, communication, wellbeing, and professional relationships. The authors identify trust and credibility as particularly difficult to establish remotely because employees receive fewer nonverbal and informal social cues, highlighting the need for deliberate relationship-building practices.
| Cisco | Cisco Newsroom | April 26, 2022
Cisco reports that many employees associate hybrid work with improved happiness, work-life balance, and productivity while also believing organizations need to do more to make hybrid environments inclusive. The findings illustrate why workplace culture cannot simply be transferred from the office to video conferencing platforms.
| CIPD | Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development | April 26, 2022
CIPD examines how flexible and hybrid working require organizations to reconsider long-established cultural assumptions about where and when work happens. Successful implementation depends on management capability, trust, communication, fairness, employee autonomy, and ensuring that people working remotely remain integrated into organizational life.
Drawing on experiences from technology companies across multiple countries, this study examines changing expectations surrounding remote and flexible work. It argues that flexibility has become an important part of the psychological relationship between employees and employers, requiring organizations to redesign management practices rather than simply returning to pre-pandemic routines.
Designing an Inclusive Hybrid Culture
| Bonnie Dowling et al. | McKinsey & Company | April 20, 2022
McKinsey examines how hybrid work can either strengthen or weaken inclusion depending on organizational practices. Team building, mutual respect, flexibility, and support for employees' lives outside work are identified as important ingredients in creating workplaces where remote and in-person employees can participate on equal terms.
| Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Katarina Berg | Harvard Business Review | August 3, 2021
This article examines the challenge of maintaining belonging when employees are divided between physical and virtual workplaces. It argues that organizations need to deliberately cultivate meaningful relationships and shared identity rather than assuming that simply bringing employees together physically will automatically create culture.
| Atlassian Community | Atlassian | July 25, 2021
This discussion addresses a common problem in distributed teams: collaboration tools may allow work to proceed efficiently while remote employees still feel socially disconnected from colleagues. It illustrates the distinction between functional communication and genuine human connection and the need to design social interaction alongside work processes.
Collaboration Beyond Video Meetings
| Longqi Yang et al. | arXiv | July 30, 2020
This large-scale study investigates how working from home changed collaboration among information workers. It found shifts in how employees communicated and collaborated, demonstrating that remote work changes the structure of workplace interaction rather than simply moving existing office relationships onto digital platforms.
Practical Principles for Culture Beyond Zoom
| Microsoft WorkLab | Microsoft | Ongoing
Microsoft's WorkLab collection examines culture, collaboration, flexible work, employee experience, and the changing workplace. The research and case studies emphasize that organizations need to rethink how employees connect and collaborate when physical presence is no longer the default organizing principle of work.
Gallup's employee-engagement research emphasizes the importance of employees feeling emotionally connected to their work, managers, colleagues, and organizations. Engagement depends heavily on relationships, recognition, expectations, development, and purpose, suggesting that workplace culture requires much more than frequent online meetings.
| GitLab | GitLab Handbook | Ongoing
GitLab documents how a fully distributed organization creates culture through explicit values, transparency, collaboration, written communication, shared expectations, and opportunities for employees to contribute. Its experience demonstrates how organizations can treat culture as a consciously designed system rather than something dependent upon sharing an office.
Creating Connection in Hybrid Teams
| Gallup | Gallup | July 27, 2026
Gallup examines how organizations can successfully manage remote and hybrid teams. The research argues that management quality has a greater influence on engagement than physical work location and emphasizes clear expectations, meaningful conversations, recognition, trust, and deliberate coordination among employees who may rarely occupy the same workplace.
| Ryan Pendell | Gallup | May 8, 2025
Gallup describes a paradox in remote employment: fully remote employees can be highly engaged with their work while simultaneously experiencing lower overall well-being. The findings show why companies should distinguish productive digital collaboration from genuine social connection and build workplace cultures that support relationships and emotional well-being alongside performance.
| Gallup | Gallup | March 11, 2025
Gallup examines the continuing evolution of workplace arrangements several years after the pandemic. Hybrid work has remained a major feature of employment, suggesting organizations need durable systems for coordinating schedules, maintaining relationships, establishing boundaries, and giving employees reasons to interact beyond routine online meetings.
| SHRM | Society for Human Resource Management | January 29, 2025
SHRM argues that burnout is strongly influenced by workplace culture rather than merely employees' personal ability to cope with stress. Flexible schedules, supportive leadership, autonomy, and thoughtful hybrid practices can help organizations create healthier environments in which employees remain connected without turning constant digital availability into an expectation.
| Gallup | Gallup | December 15, 2024
Gallup identifies hybrid work as one of the major challenges facing workplaces. With employees working in different locations and on different schedules, organizations must create clearer coordination practices and make physical workplaces sufficiently valuable that employees see in-person attendance as an opportunity for collaboration and connection rather than simply an obligation.
Trust, Transparency, and Belonging
| Deloitte | Deloitte | November 20, 2024
Deloitte argues that measuring modern workforce performance requires looking beyond hours worked or physical visibility. Organizations should recognize employee contributions to business outcomes as well as culture, relationships, well-being, and organizational effectiveness, helping reduce the temptation to equate office presence with productivity.
| Stanford University | Cardinal at Work | August 19, 2024
Stanford's guidance for managers emphasizes trust, transparency, clarity, openness, and relationship maintenance in hybrid teams. Managers are encouraged to establish predictable communication practices while ensuring that employees have opportunities for meaningful interpersonal interaction rather than relying entirely on formal virtual meetings.
| Deloitte | Deloitte Insights | June 18, 2024
Deloitte identifies a significant gap between executives' perceptions of employee experience and workers' actual assessments of belonging, purpose, skills development, and well-being. The findings demonstrate why leaders cannot assume employees feel connected simply because digital communication systems appear to function effectively.
| American Psychological Association | APA | June 13, 2024
An American Psychological Association survey examines stress and loneliness among younger workers. The findings highlight the importance of workplace relationships and suggest that organizations should treat social connection and psychological well-being as substantive elements of workplace culture rather than incidental benefits of working in an office.
| Stanford University | Stanford Report | June 12, 2024
Stanford reports on a large randomized experiment showing that employees working from home two days per week were as productive and as likely to be promoted as employees working entirely in the office while experiencing substantially improved retention. The results challenge the assumption that strong organizations require permanent physical presence.
Designing Workplace Culture Deliberately
| Carina Cortese | SHRM | February 22, 2024
This case study examines how Harry's approached hybrid workplace design as a broader organizational strategy rather than simply deciding how many days employees should report to an office. Hybrid policies can become opportunities to reconsider collaboration, employee experience, cultural rituals, management practices, and the purposes for which people meet in person.
| Arlene Hirsch | SHRM | February 19, 2024
SHRM examines tensions surrounding efforts to bring remote employees back into offices. The article illustrates the importance of explaining why physical attendance is valuable and suggests that organizations need to balance employee preferences for flexibility with legitimate organizational needs for collaboration and relationship-building.
| SHRM | Society for Human Resource Management | February 12, 2024
SHRM discusses leadership choices surrounding remote, hybrid, and on-site work and emphasizes creating a culture of connection. Regular purposeful gatherings—whether quarterly, annually, or more frequently—can support collaboration, idea generation, relationships, and shared identity without necessarily requiring continuous office attendance.
| Deloitte | Deloitte Insights | February 5, 2024
Deloitte argues that organizations operating in an increasingly boundaryless world should prioritize human performance rather than relying exclusively on traditional measures of worker productivity. Trust, experimentation, employee development, sustainability, and human capabilities become particularly important as work becomes more distributed.
| Deloitte | Deloitte Insights | February 4, 2024
Deloitte explores the growth of workplace microcultures within teams, departments, and other employee communities. Instead of expecting one uniform corporate culture to govern every interaction, organizations can encourage local communities whose practices reflect broader organizational values while responding to the needs of particular groups.
| SHRM | Society for Human Resource Management | January 29, 2024
Human-resources professionals describe several approaches to organizing hybrid workplaces, including team-based expectations and flexible attendance. The examples suggest that successful hybrid cultures depend less on universal attendance rules than on coordinating people when there is a meaningful reason for them to work together.
Why Face-to-Face Interaction Still Matters
| Stanford Graduate School of Business | Stanford Graduate School of Business | January 24, 2024
Stanford researchers examine differences between virtual and face-to-face collaboration. Experiments found that pairs meeting face-to-face generated more ideas than pairs interacting through video, suggesting that organizations may benefit from reserving physical gatherings for activities such as creativity, brainstorming, relationship-building, and exploratory discussion rather than routine information exchange.
| American Psychological Association | APA | 2023
APA's Work in America Survey examines psychological health, well-being, and workplace relationships. Importantly, loneliness and isolation are not problems restricted to remote employees, demonstrating that simply gathering employees inside the same building does not automatically create meaningful social connection.
| American Psychological Association | APA | July 13, 2023
The American Psychological Association explains why belonging is important to employee health and workplace effectiveness. Employers can combat loneliness and disconnection by encouraging genuine relationships, creating opportunities for informal interaction, supporting employee resource groups, and helping workers develop meaningful connections with colleagues.
Rethinking What the Office Is For
| Harvard Business Impact | Harvard Business Publishing | January 20, 2023
Harvard Business Impact discusses leadership in workplaces where employees alternate between remote and physical environments. Leaders need to communicate clearly about the purposes of hybrid arrangements, establish fair expectations, and recognize that different groups of employees can experience virtual work in substantially different ways.
| Johnny Wood | World Economic Forum | December 20, 2022
This article examines the gap between executives who often favor greater office attendance and employees who frequently prefer hybrid arrangements. The disagreement demonstrates why workplace policy should involve communication and negotiation rather than assuming that either full-time remote work or full-time office work automatically produces stronger collaboration.
| Dell Technologies | World Economic Forum | October 3, 2022
Dell Technologies challenges the idea that flexible work inevitably destroys organizational culture. Its long experience with remote and hybrid working suggests that shared values, inclusion, flexibility, accountability, and clear organizational purpose can help sustain culture even when employees do not occupy the same physical workspace every day.
| Stanford Graduate School of Business | Stanford Graduate School of Business | August 17, 2022
Stanford research explores the kinds of interpersonal ties that facilitate innovation within remote teams. Successful distributed collaboration depends not merely on maximizing communication but on developing the right patterns of relationships through which information, trust, perspectives, and ideas can move across an organization.
Shared Activities Beyond Meetings
| Stanford Graduate School of Business | Stanford Graduate School of Business | July 29, 2022
Stanford research examines employee volunteering as a mechanism for strengthening workplace relationships. Shared activities outside normal work responsibilities can connect people who might otherwise interact only through digital tasks, potentially giving remote and hybrid employees additional opportunities to develop social ties and organizational identification.
| McKinsey & Company | World Economic Forum | April 20, 2022
This article examines how organizations can make hybrid workplaces more inclusive. It recommends establishing norms that encourage employees to see one another as people rather than merely coworkers, understanding individual communication preferences, supporting work-life boundaries, and experimenting with when people genuinely benefit from meeting physically.
| World Economic Forum | World Economic Forum | April 12, 2022
Drawing on Microsoft's Work Trend Index, this article describes the difficulty organizations face adapting workplace culture to hybrid work. Employees increasingly value positive workplace culture and well-being, while employers must address loneliness and the greater difficulty of developing relationships when much communication occurs remotely.
Flexibility and Organizational Culture
| Nicholas Bloom | Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research | 2021
Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom argues that hybrid work can combine advantages of home and office environments. Individual concentration can occur remotely while larger meetings, training, collaboration, innovation, and social activities can be concentrated into strategically chosen office days.
| World Economic Forum | World Economic Forum | November 24, 2021
This article examines the emerging hybrid workplace and argues that organizations cannot simply reproduce old office routines through technology. Successful hybrid environments require redesigned practices, technology that supports participation across locations, and management systems capable of integrating physical and remote employees.
| World Economic Forum | World Economic Forum | October 5, 2021
The World Economic Forum examines evidence concerning remote work, productivity, inclusion, innovation, and burnout. Remote work can provide significant advantages, but organizations need management practices that protect employee well-being and prevent flexibility from turning into constant availability or digital overwork.
| World Economic Forum | World Economic Forum | September 6, 2021
Research summarized by the World Economic Forum suggests remote work can improve productivity in some circumstances, partly because employees spend less time commuting. This creates an opportunity for organizations to rethink the office as a social and collaborative environment rather than requiring employees to travel there simply to perform individual computer-based tasks.
Managing Proximity Bias
| Dave Zielinski | SHRM | March 8, 2023
SHRM examines technologies and management practices designed to help leaders manage distributed employees. Clear goals, feedback, employee recognition, and structured communication can help prevent remote employees from becoming invisible and reduce proximity bias that favors workers who happen to spend more time physically near managers.
Culture Is More Than Communication Technology
| SHRM Labs | Society for Human Resource Management | Ongoing
SHRM's guidance on connected workforces argues that healthy hybrid cultures require purposeful face-to-face interaction as well as informal virtual connection. Organizations should also ensure that remote and on-site employees have comparable opportunities to participate, contribute, develop relationships, and advance professionally.
| SHRM Labs | Society for Human Resource Management | Ongoing
SHRM examines employee engagement in increasingly distributed workplaces. Digital collaboration platforms and informal online spaces can help colleagues remain connected, but technology is most effective when embedded within broader practices supporting open communication, social relationships, community, recognition, and belonging.
| SHRM Labs | Society for Human Resource Management | Ongoing
SHRM summarizes research and practices for making hybrid work successful. Flexible arrangements can improve employee well-being and efficiency, but organizations need intentional strategies for managing employees, maintaining fairness, communicating expectations, and preserving interpersonal connection across physical distance.
Belonging and Culture in Hybrid Work
| Vanessa Urch Druskat and Nikhil Awasty | Academy of Management Proceedings | 2025
This research proposes a model explaining how a culture of belonging can improve the effectiveness of hybrid teams. Feeling valued and integral to a group may encourage employees to share information, express ideas, consider colleagues' perspectives, and engage in other behaviors that strengthen trust, cohesion, and collaboration.
| Ghazale Shoghaliniri and Jane O'Reilly | Academy of Management Proceedings | 2025
This research examines how employees develop a sense of belonging in remote and hybrid workplaces. As geographically distributed employment becomes increasingly normal, organizations need deliberate mechanisms through which employees can develop attachment to colleagues, teams, and the larger organization without relying on everyday office proximity.
This qualitative study examines how employees experience belonging in hybrid workplaces. Interviews identified both advantages of remote work, including greater control over work and personal time, and distinctive advantages of working on-site, particularly human connection and informal information exchange. The findings suggest that workplace culture benefits when organizations understand what each environment contributes rather than treating remote and office work as interchangeable.
Team Building Beyond Video Calls
| Rebecca Knight | Harvard Business Review | August 22, 2024
This practical guide addresses the additional effort required to make remote and in-person members of hybrid teams feel equally included. Managers can strengthen community by deliberately designing activities that allow employees in different locations to participate meaningfully rather than allowing physical proximity to determine who becomes socially connected.
| Rebecca Knight | Harvard Business Review | August 7, 2024
This article presents team-building activities designed for in-person, remote, and hybrid employees. Its broader lesson is that interpersonal connection cannot be left entirely to chance when colleagues are geographically dispersed; managers need to create opportunities for employees to know one another outside their immediate task responsibilities.
| Michael Gibbs, Friederike Mengel, and Christoph Siemroth | Scientific Reports | July 2024
Using detailed data covering more than 48,000 employees, this research examines innovation under office, home, and hybrid arrangements. The study found that coordination mattered significantly: innovation suffered particularly when hybrid teams were poorly coordinated about when members worked from the office, demonstrating the value of intentionally synchronizing collaborative time.
Making Office Time Meaningful
| Microsoft WorkLab | Microsoft | 2024
Microsoft argues that employees need a clear reason for traveling to a workplace. Rather than using office attendance as an end in itself, organizations should define which activities genuinely benefit from physical presence and coordinate attendance around collaboration, relationships, team building, and other forms of interaction that are difficult to reproduce remotely.
| Microsoft WorkLab | Microsoft | 2024
This guide distinguishes among different modes of collaboration across time and place. It recommends reserving face-to-face time for activities particularly suited to human presence—including team building, sensitive conversations, networking, onboarding, brainstorming, and launching new projects—while allowing other work to happen asynchronously.
| Microsoft WorkLab | Microsoft | 2024
Microsoft's collection of hybrid-work guides examines in-person collaboration, asynchronous work, work-life balance, and hybrid meetings. Together they advocate deliberately matching the communication method to the activity rather than automatically scheduling another video meeting whenever employees need to work together.
Relationships and Employee Connection
| Kristen Lipton | Gallup | September 29, 2023
Gallup examines both the advantages and risks of hybrid work. While flexibility can increase engagement, employees working remotely can face disadvantages involving development and connection to organizational purpose, requiring leaders to ensure that access to mentoring, information, recognition, and advancement does not depend on physical visibility.
| Researchers | Personality and Individual Differences | February 2023
This study of employees in the United States and United Kingdom examines the relationship among remote work, loneliness, hope, and job engagement. Remote work itself did not necessarily reduce engagement; lower engagement was particularly associated with employees experiencing moderate or high loneliness, highlighting the importance of addressing social isolation directly.
Resilient Distributed Teams
| Ronnie de Souza Santos, Gianisa Adisaputri, and Paul Ralph | arXiv | March 10, 2023
This research examines resilience in hybrid software-development teams. Reduced spontaneous face-to-face interaction can make group maturation and cohesion more difficult, while the configuration of who works where and when can either support or undermine team interaction. The findings emphasize designing hybrid schedules around relationships rather than individual attendance alone.
| Ronnie E. de Souza Santos and Paul Ralph | arXiv | February 21, 2022
A year-long study investigates coordination within remote-first and hybrid software teams. The researchers found that group cohesion and effective communication can protect coordination, while distrust and communication difficulties undermine it, suggesting that successful remote cultures depend heavily on interpersonal relationships and shared working practices.
Preventing Proximity Bias
| Mark Mortensen and Martine Haas | Harvard Business Review | November–December 2022
This article argues that forcing employees back into offices is not necessarily the best solution to concerns about weakening organizational culture. Instead, companies should deliberately identify the values and behaviors that define their culture and create systems that reinforce them across both physical and virtual workplaces.
| Arlene S. Hirsch | SHRM | March 22, 2022
SHRM examines proximity bias—the tendency for managers to favor employees who are physically nearby. Hybrid workplaces can unintentionally create different classes of employees unless leaders deliberately distribute information, recognition, assignments, mentoring, and advancement opportunities regardless of where employees work.
Culture Without a Permanent Office
| Researcher | Humanities and Social Sciences | 2022
This research investigates organizational culture under home-working conditions. While many cultural values remained resilient during remote work, maintaining trust, honesty, respect, communication, and motivation proved particularly challenging, identifying precisely the interpersonal dimensions that distributed organizations need to reinforce deliberately.
| Ken Babcock | World Economic Forum | October 20, 2022
Drawing on experience managing a fully remote organization, this article offers strategies for developing culture without relying on a shared office. Remote organizations must create deliberate mechanisms for connection and shared values because the informal interactions that traditionally communicated workplace culture occur less automatically.
| Mohit Joshi and Renate Wagner | World Economic Forum | September 14, 2022
This article examines how organizations can create employee-centered hybrid cultures. Flexible work can improve recruitment and retention, but companies must redesign leadership, workplace practices, technology, and collaboration so that employees remain connected even when they spend substantial amounts of time apart.
Rebuilding Cross-Team Relationships
| Ron Carucci | Harvard Business Review | November 10, 2021
Remote work can strengthen communication within immediate teams while weakening relationships across organizational boundaries. This article argues that hybrid organizations should deliberately rebuild cross-functional relationships so that employees continue encountering ideas, perspectives, information, and people outside their immediate working groups.
| Microsoft | Microsoft WorkLab | September 9, 2021
Microsoft describes the "hybrid paradox": employees value the ability to work from different locations while simultaneously wanting greater in-person connection. Successful cultures therefore need to preserve flexibility while giving employees worthwhile opportunities to interact personally with coworkers.
Social Capital and Workplace Networks
| Microsoft | Microsoft WorkLab | March 22, 2021
Microsoft's Work Trend Index identified rebuilding social capital as a central challenge of hybrid work. Digital work can narrow employees' professional networks, so organizations should actively encourage managers and employees to develop relationships across teams rather than assuming those networks will develop spontaneously.
| Jared Spataro | Microsoft WorkLab | March 18, 2021
Microsoft examines employee well-being during the shift toward remote and hybrid work. Rising after-hours communication illustrates how digital workplaces can become permanently connected environments unless leaders create norms protecting breaks, boundaries, personal time, and employees' ability to disconnect.
Research on Remote Collaboration
This systematic review analyzes decades of research concerning hybrid meetings and collaboration. The literature demonstrates that mixed environments containing both co-located and remote participants create distinctive communication challenges, making inclusive meeting design an important component of hybrid workplace culture.
Beyond Meeting-Centered Culture
| Microsoft WorkLab | Microsoft | 2022
Microsoft argues that flexible work should not mean employees are perpetually available. Healthy hybrid cultures need boundaries that protect concentration and personal time, allowing organizations to replace constant meetings and notifications with communication practices appropriate to the actual urgency and complexity of work.
Workplace Culture and Employee Engagement
Gallup's organizational-culture research challenges the assumption that remote work automatically damages culture. Its findings suggest that employee connection to culture depends heavily on leadership and management practices, reinforcing the idea that organizations should focus on the quality of employee experience rather than location alone.
Workplace Cohesion
| Researchers | Journal of Management Development | June 22, 2026
This study examines cohesion, supportive culture, engagement, and performance among remote and hybrid workers. Both workplace cohesion and supportive organizational culture were associated with stronger performance, with employee engagement helping explain the relationship, showing that social resources continue to matter even when employees work at a distance.
The Purpose of Physical Workplaces
| Stanford University | Stanford University Administrative Guide | 2024
Stanford's hybrid-work policy illustrates how a large institution can combine flexible working arrangements with a workplace culture emphasizing collaboration and continuous communication. Hybrid arrangements work best when technology, management, service expectations, and collaboration practices are deliberately coordinated.
