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• Research led by Nicholas Bloom shows that employees who work from home for two days a week are just as productive and as likely to be promoted as their fully office-based peers.
• The study found that hybrid work had zero effect on workers’ productivity or career advancement and dramatically boosted retention rates.

It is one of the most hotly debated topics in today’s workplace: Is allowing employees to log in from home a few days a week good for their productivity, careers, and job satisfaction?

Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economist and one of the foremost researchers on work-from-home policies, has uncovered compelling evidence that hybrid schedules are a boon to both employees and their bosses. 

In a study, newly published in the journal Nature , of an experiment on more than 1,600 workers at Trip.com – a Chinese company that is one of the world’s largest online travel agencies – Bloom finds that employees who work from home for two days a week are just as productive and as likely to be promoted as their fully office-based peers.

On a third key measure, employee turnover, the results were also encouraging. Resignations fell by 33% among workers who shifted from working full-time in the office to a hybrid schedule. Women, non-managers, and employees with long commutes were the least likely to quit their jobs when their treks to the office were cut to three days a week. Trip.com estimates that reduced attrition saved the company millions of dollars. 

“The results are clear: Hybrid work is a win-win-win for employee productivity, performance, and retention,” says Bloom, who is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences and also a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).

The findings are especially significant given that, by Bloom’s count, about 100 million workers worldwide now spend a mix of days at home and in the office each week, more than four years after COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns upended how and where people do their jobs. Many of these hybrid workers are lawyers, accountants, marketers, software engineers, and others with a college degree or higher. 

Over time, though, working outside the office has come under attack from high-profile business leaders like Elon Musk, the head of Tesla, SpaceX, and X (formerly Twitter), and Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who argue that the costs of remote work outweigh any benefits. Opponents say that employee training and mentoring, innovation, and company culture suffer when workers are not on-site five days a week.

Blooms says that critics often confuse hybrid for fully remote, in part because most of the research into working from home has focused on workers who aren’t required to come into an office and on a specific type of job, like customer support or data entry. The results of these studies have been mixed, though they tend to skew negative. This suggests to Bloom that problems with fully remote work arise when it’s not managed well.

As one of the few randomized control trials to analyze hybrid arrangements – where workers are offsite two or three days a week and are in the office the rest of the time – Bloom says his findings offer important lessons for other multinationals, many of which share similarities with Trip.com.

“This study offers powerful evidence for why 80% of U.S. companies now offer some form of remote work,” Bloom says, “and for why the remaining 20% of firms that don’t are likely paying a price.”

The research is also the largest to date of hybrid work involving university-trained professionals that rely on the gold standard in research, the randomized controlled trial. This allowed Bloom and his co-authors to show that the benefits they identified resulted from Trip.com’s hybrid experiment and not something else.

In addition to Bloom, the study’s authors are Ruobing Han, an assistant professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and James Liang, an economics professor at Peking University and co-founder of Trip.com. Han and Liang both earned their PhDs in economics from Stanford.

The hybrid approach: Only winners

Trip.com didn’t have a hybrid work policy when it undertook the six-month experiment starting in 2021 that is at the heart of the study. In all, 395 managers and 1,217 non-managers with undergraduate degrees – all of whom worked in engineering, marketing, accounting, and finance in the company’s Shanghai office – participated. Employees whose birthdays fell on an even-numbered day of the month were told to come to the office five days a week. Workers with odd-numbered birthdays were allowed to work from home two days a week.

Of the study participants, 32% also had postgraduate degrees, mostly in computer science, accounting, or finance. Most were in their mid-30s, half had children, and 65% were male. 

In finding that hybrid work not only helps employees, but also companies, the researchers relied on various company data and worker surveys, including performance reviews and promotions for up to two years after the experiment. Trip.com’s thorough performance review process includes evaluations of an employee’s contributions to innovation, leadership, and mentoring. 

The study authors also compared the quality and amount of computer code written by Trip.com software engineers who were hybrid against code produced by peers who were in the office full-time.

In finding that hybrid work had zero effect on workers’ productivity or career advancement and dramatically boosted retention rates, the study authors highlight some important nuances. Resignations, for example, fell only among non-managers; managers were just as likely to quit whether they were hybrid or not.

Bloom and his co-authors identify misconceptions held by workers and their bosses. Workers, especially women, were reluctant to sign up as volunteers for Trip.com’s hybrid trial – likely for fear that they would be judged negatively for not coming into the office five days a week, Bloom says. In addition, managers predicted on average that remote working would hurt productivity, only to change their minds by the time the experiment ended. 

For business leaders, Bloom says the study confirms that concerns that hybrid work does more harm than good are overblown.

“If managed right, letting employees work from home two or three days a week still gets you the level of mentoring, culture-building, and innovation that you want,” Bloom says. “From an economic policymaking standpoint, hybrid work is one of the few instances where there aren’t major trade-offs with clear winners and clear losers. There are almost only winners.”

Trip.com was sold: It now allows hybrid work companywide.

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12 Questions About Hybrid Work, Answered

• Tsedal Neeley

As we move into the next phase of the pandemic, companies are grappling with whether and how to bring their employees back into the office after working from home extensively. According to multiple surveys, most people want a mix of in-person and remote work, and some have said they would leave their jobs if not given that option. So, how do you design hybrid work plans successfully? It isn’t just about schedules and office space — leaders need to consider inclusion, performance measurement, trust, cybersecurity, and more. In this edited Q&A, remote work expert Tsedal Neeley answers corporate leaders’ most pressing questions about the shift to hybrid work.

Advice on inclusivity, onboarding, performance measurement, and more.

Extensive data across surveys indicate that most people want hybrid work arrangements — that is, a mix of in-person and remote work — as we continue to move through the pandemic. For example, Microsoft’s 2021 Work Trend Index , a study of over 30,000 people in 31 countries, found that 73% of respondents desire remote work options. FlexJobs surveyed more than 2,100 people who worked remotely during the pandemic and found that 58% would leave their jobs if they weren’t able to continue working from home at least some of the time.

• Tsedal Neeley is the Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration and senior associate dean of faculty and research at Harvard Business School. She is the coauthor of the book The Digital Mindset: What It Really Takes to Thrive in the Age of Data, Algorithms, and AI and the author of the book Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere . tsedal

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Seven Truths About Hybrid Work and Productivity

To get the most from hybrid work, leaders should prepare for trade-offs, make expectations clear, and think harder about how productivity is measured..

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Our collective experience of the pandemic enabled us to conduct endless experiments with work. Initially, the experiments were about where work took place (the home becoming a viable option), and soon they became about when work took place (the rigors of nine-to-five morphing into more flexible arrangements). Even now, leaders are watching with some combination of unease, hope, and curiosity to see what effects these experiments are having on the organization, especially on workers’ productivity.

In mid-July, I and my research team at HSM ran a research webinar on the topic of productivity , in part to explore how the definition and measurement of productivity are shifting and what these changes mean for individuals, managers, teams, and organizational design. More than 200 people, mostly in human resources and primarily at the managerial level, participated. It was a small but diverse sample, representing 79 organizations and 28 countries. Using quantitative polling during the session, we dug into the current situation.

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One standout set of data points: Of the people polled during the webinar, 61% said hybrid has had a positive impact on productivity (16% said very positive and 45% said positive). Only 15% said it was negative. Of course, the answer to the question of whether hybrid is always best is more nuanced than a simple yes or no.

What We’re Seeing in Hybrid Experiments Worldwide

The webinar reinforced what has been emerging over the past three years in my research about how people work today and the drivers of sustainable high performance. Although the big takeaways are a work in progress, seven truths about hybrid work and productivity have begun to emerge.

1. Hybrid work is a continuum. Our research indicates that there’s been a settling down of practices and implications since the end of the pandemic. Some companies (like JPMorgan and Tesla) are requiring the majority of employees to go back into the office. Some companies (like Airbnb) are implementing a “work from anywhere” policy. The majority are somewhere in the middle: We see language such as “majority office-based” (like Goldman Sachs), “team-led office days” (like Apple and Salesforce), and “flexible arrangement” (like HSBC and CCL Industries). These are all riffs around employees spending some time in the office and some at home. In other words, it’s a continuum of flexibility with a great deal of variety.

2. It’s crucial to communicate policies straightforwardly. My advice to senior teams about hybrid working: Make the “deal” clear. For example, don’t pretend that there’s flexibility when the culture is to be in the office and a failure to show up will be punished. Humans are perfectly capable of making informed choices about the organizations they want to work at. But to be informed, people need clear and unambiguous information about what the terms of the agreement are.

3. Leaders need to be prepared for the trade-offs. Another piece of advice for senior leaders is to acknowledge that all deals have compromises associated with them. Now, with three years of hybrid experiments under our belts, it’s becoming ever clearer what these trade-offs are. Take the “work every day from the office” deal. The downsides of return-to-office mandates are the loss of some potentially highly talented people who value flexibility, and the potential erosion of the energy of those who are enduring a long commute. Or take the “work from home most days” deal. Here, a potential trade-off is the erosion of social capital. Sure, an experienced manager can mentor and coach remotely, but many struggle with it; the consequence is that unexperienced workers may fail to receive that all-important in-person coaching attention. Leaders need to face up to the inevitable drawbacks of whatever deals they make and mitigate the downsides.

4. Acknowledge differing narratives about the impact of hybrid working on productivity. I saw differing narratives play out recently in a leadership team meeting I attended and in the global webinar my research team conducted. In the leadership meeting at a global fintech, I was the external speaker. I had prepared five themes to discuss (including the hot topic of generative AI). Yet, quickly (and surprisingly), I realized it was hybrid work that was the topic of the moment. And as I listened carefully to the debate, the word I kept hearing was productivity . More specifically, it was the concern that in the long run, productivity would drop in situations involving hybrid working.

As I noted earlier, 61% of attendees in my webinar who took our poll said that hybrid was having a positive impact on productivity, while 15% said it was negative. Fifteen percent is a smaller figure, but it’s not insignificant.

It’s clear that narratives differ. Groups of leaders (like the fintech leaders) fret about the impact of hybrid — while the perception of the webinar group (more representative of the development and HR functions) was more generally upbeat that hybrid working is having a positive impact on productivity.

While 61% of webinar attendees said hybrid was having a positive impact on productivity, 15% said it was negative.

5. Productivity is usually challenging — and measurement is always complex. The axis of these differing narratives about hybrid are concerns about productivity. So let’s put the hybrid/productivity issue into context. In the webinar, we asked the question, “Has increasing productivity gains been a challenge for you?” Only 13% answered “Increasing productivity is not a challenge.” The current experience for the majority of people who responded is that increasing productivity gains is a challenge. When we asked why, we heard that productivity is a concept that is complex, little understood, and hard to move the needle on in a verifiable way. In other words, productivity is not simply a hybrid work issue.

Yet there’s something about understanding productivity that’s particularly important for understanding the impact of hybrid work on it. I caught a glimpse of this in the answers to two further questions.

The first was a qualitative question: “Describe a time when you feel productive.” Webinar participants posted their views in the chat field and used an open-field link to share longer answers. Comments included “a state of flow,” “focused, energized, and in control,” “proud of my accomplishments,” “working well with others,” and “feeling autonomous.” It’s clear that we humans know when we’re feeling productive and that we have no difficulty describing our feelings.

The second question was also qualitative: “How do you measure productivity in your company?” Some of the comments were “utilization rates,” “lines of code,” “revenue per employee,” “on-time delivery,” and “customer feedback.” Notice the distinction between how it feels to be productive — which are human descriptions — and the measurements of productivity, which are mainly machinelike descriptions. The challenge is that commonly used productivity measures capture solid, verifiable outcomes. Our human perspective, on the other hand, is about energy, collaboration, and feelings.

So here is one of the biggest hybrid challenges: Many jobs that can be designed as hybrid —such as project management, strategy planning, creating presentations, and coaching a team member — are based on cognitive tasks that rarely include easily verifiable, comparative productivity measures. If we want to increase our understanding of potential hybrid productivity boosts , like increasing energy (which can come from avoiding a commute) and increasing autonomy (which can arise from working from home), we need to widen our thinking about metrics. And the same is true if we want to confront hybrid productivity challenges , like working with others (which can feel jeopardized if people feel isolated at home).

6. It’s useful to view hybrid work as fundamentally a job design option. We asked the webinar participants to share examples of when and how they achieved productivity gains. Three major clusters emerged: when they used generative AI and chatbots, when they had more effective collaboration, and when they developed skills. We then asked participants to rate which of five potential productivity boosts was most important: Thirty-three percent selected “working with machines,” 24% selected “job design,” and 23% chose “leaders.” This is important — for although hybrid work has primarily been seen as a creator of flexibility, in reality it’s a job design play. In other words, the question we should ask isn’t so much “How can hybrid work deliver on job flexibility?” but rather “How can the redesign of work increase productivity, with hybrid work as an enabler?” When seen through the lens of work design, the possibilities of hybrid work are about how we can increase collaboration, provide more time for focused work, and remove energy-depleting activities.

How can the redesign of work increase productivity, with hybrid work as an enabler?

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7. An expanded set of productivity measures needs to be part of the conversation. Too often, the move to hybrid work has been seen almost as an article of faith: You are either a true believer or someone who’s totally against it. What I heard from the fintech leadership team was a more nuanced question about productivity. They wanted to understand, at a granular level, the impact of hybrid work on productivity and, importantly, to answer the question “Does it boost or deplete productivity?” This is an entirely reasonable question.

As I mentioned earlier, though, to answer it, companies need to reengage with measures of productivity — particularly collaboration, energy, and focus. Some of these characteristics can be measured quantitatively (for example, through collaboration network analysis) and some qualitatively (for example, feelings of energy and focus). Until these productivity measures are in place, leaders will always fear and debate the impact of hybrid work on productivity.

About the Author

Lynda Gratton ( @lyndagratton ) is a professor of management practice at London Business School and founder of HSM Advisory. Her most recent book is Redesigning Work: How to Transform Your Organization and Make Hybrid Work for Everyone (MIT Press, 2022).

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What science says about hybrid working — and how to make it a success

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Certain aspects of scientific life do not lend themselves to working from home. Archaeologist Adrià Breu, who studies neolithic pottery at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain, can’t dig for artefacts in his kitchen, and Claudia Sala’s experiments in molecular microbiology at the Toscana Life Sciences Foundation in Siena, Italy, oblige her to commute to her laboratory most days. But both these researchers also get to work from home — when they write up papers, for example, or analyse data.

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Hybrid work: Making it fit with your diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy

After the Great Resignation comes the Great Renegotiation. Over the past two years, millions of people and organizations around the world were forced into hybrid virtual work, many for the first time. Survey after survey has shown that employers eagerly hope their employees will return to the office as soon as possible. Employees ? Not so much , for reasons including health, family, and the work–life balance. Now, vaccines and therapies hold out the promise of normalizing life under the coronavirus and its variants, but employees increasingly hold more bargaining chips in a great debate now underway over the future of workplace models.

Our methodology

This research effort surveyed 1,345 respondents across three continents (North America, Europe, and Australia) in November 2021. We defined hybrid as including both hybrid models of work (a mix of virtual and on-site) and fully virtual work: both models do not require a full-time, on-site presence and have implications for the way organizations and managers create an inclusive workplace with fewer to no in-person interactions.

The research focuses on respondents whose roles currently allow hybrid work. To ensure that the experiences reported were tied to workplace contexts, it excluded a small group of participants who were unemployed longer than 18 months. A variety of industries, job levels, and social identities were represented. Given the complex nature of racial identity, only US survey participants were asked to identify their race, to ensure that the racial categories presented were relevant and appropriate for the respondents.

We believe organizations also have an opportunity to redefine hybrid work in the context of frontline roles, such as machinists and surgeons, that are typically fully on-site. We will explore these topics in future research.

Our latest research reinforces the idea that hybrid 1 Our definition of hybrid work combines the responses our survey sample expressed toward hybrid and virtual work—terms for models that do not require a full-time presence in the office and are frequently conflated and rapidly evolving in most organizations today. work is here to stay. More than four out of five survey respondents who worked in hybrid models over the past two years prefer retaining them going forward (see sidebar, “Our methodology”). At a time when organizations are plagued by burnout, mental-health issues, and record numbers of employees leaving their jobs, leaders who see in-person work as a return to normality must confront just how strongly employees feel about flexible workplace models and their growing leverage to pursue them. We found that more than two out of three employees who prefer hybrid models say they are likely to look for other opportunities if asked to return fully on-site. Despite such popular support, the experience of employees with hybrid work during the pandemic has varied widely in key areas, such as a sense of inclusion and the work–life balance. For some traditionally underrepresented identities, this variability is exacerbated.

As employers work to refit existing workplace models, they face a classic risk/reward choice. Hybrid work has the potential to offer a higher level of flexibility, a better work–life balance, and a more tailored employee experience. These can have a disproportionately positive impact on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts , as well as on performance. Hybrid work also has the potential to create an unequal playing field and to amplify in-group versus out-group dynamics, which can flip those advantages to the liabilities side of the ledger. For workplaces already challenged to diversify and retain employees, adopting ill-conceived hybrid work models could instead speed departures, decrease inclusion, and harm performance.

Make no mistake: tapping the benefits of a more inclusive hybrid work culture is difficult, delicate work. There’s scant evidence of companies that have mastered the challenge. What’s more, the practices needed to take it on can feel nebulous and elusive, especially for leaders who have never worked in a truly inclusive culture themselves. In this article, we share research that illuminates the dynamics that underlie efforts to build inclusion in a diverse, hybrid workforce and the three critical inclusion practices—work–life support, team building, and mutual respect—that leaders should treat as priorities.

A hard look at hybrid

Even before the pandemic, workers craved fluidity: in 2019, our research found that work–life flexibility was the number-one issue employees raised. As the economy navigates the reopening of offices in this next phase of the pandemic, executives often conflate “hybrid” with “flexibility,” especially the location of work. Moreover, today’s hybrid working models were not the product of measured strategic planning but, often, of desperate triage efforts spliced together when disaster struck. Some organizations forced into remote work addressed attrition, isolation, and mental-health woes better than others, but these ill effects remain prevalent across the business  landscape, particularly for some traditionally underrepresented groups .

This reality obliges leaders to design better models. True flexibility must go beyond location to include the different preferences and needs of an increasingly diverse employee workforce. It demands a sharp focus on the reasons people have been leaving jobs, often without new job offers in hand: work–life balance and flexibility loom large, but employees also yearn for a greater sense of belonging and of feeling appreciated. Finding the sweet spot between hybrid work and strong inclusion can make an organization a highly attractive place  to work but requires leaders, at all levels, to listen, to coach, and to think of flexibility not as an end point but as a set of evolving expectations, with regular adjustments, perhaps down to the level of individual employees.

Despite the variability of hybrid work, employees appear hooked on it and unwilling to let it go. In our survey, 75 percent of all respondents said that they prefer a hybrid working model (Exhibit 1). Only 25 percent said they prefer to be fully on-site.

Who likes hybrid work most?

Of employees currently working in a hybrid model, 85 percent want it retained going forward. This strong preference appears across industries, geographies, and demographic boundaries.

Some traditionally underrepresented groups demonstrated an even stronger preference for hybrid work.

• Employees with disabilities were 11 percent more likely to prefer a hybrid work model than employees without disabilities.
• More than 70 percent of men and women expressed strong preferences for hybrid work, but nonbinary employees were 14 percent more likely to prefer it.
• LGBQ+ 2 In this survey we intended to avoid conflating gender identity and sexual orientation. Transgender respondents were included in the gender identity analyses, and we used the updated acronym LGBQ+ for the sexual-orientation analyses. In our sample, this group included respondents who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, queer, and asexual. employees were 13 percent more likely to prefer hybrid work than their heterosexual peers.

For managers sensitive to the importance of inclusion and diversity, such examples highlight another possible dividend from hybrid work models. Consider, for example, the employee who may be hiding a disability, gender identity, or sexual orientation to avoid the stigma that can come with declaring it. Research shows that efforts to conceal such identities may take a toll on an employee’s well-being and performance. 3 K. P. Jones and E. B. King, “Managing concealable stigmas at work: A review and multilevel model,” Journal of Management , 40(5), 2014. Ideally, employees would be comfortable sharing these identities with colleagues, and organizations would provide the inclusive environment in which they could. When they do not, however, hybrid work environments can relieve some of the strain.

Who likes hybrid work enough to quit?

Our research also explored the respondents’ willingness to leave jobs because of work models. For employers battling widespread, rising attrition and an increasing labor shortage as employees quit jobs, even without another offer in hand , such insights could help stanch the talent outflow. Of those who prefer hybrid work, 71 percent say they are likely to look for other opportunities if it is not available where they work now.

These were among the groups that prefer hybrid work and said they were likely to leave if it wasn’t available:

• Younger employees (18–34 years old) were 59 percent more likely to leave than older ones (55–64 years old).
• Black employees were 14 percent more likely than their White peers.
• LGBQ+ employees were 24 percent more likely to leave than heterosexual ones.
• Women were approximately 10 percent more likely than men, and employees who identify as nonbinary were 18 percent more likely than men and women.
• Employees with disabilities were 14 percent more likely to leave than employees without them.

A hybrid workplace of one’s own?

These undercurrents of employee identity, tenure, and experience can make the task of shaping inclusive work environments a daunting one. Some companies are aggressively trying to bring employees back on-site, while others experiment with a range of flexible options. At the extreme, some executives even talk of a need to scale work model personalization, tailoring it to an individual employee’s professional and personal context. To date, the idea of shaping an inclusion approach to an “n of 1” is largely uncharted territory (and so is simultaneously scaling protocols, norms, and ways of working to suit an organization’s shared goals). Managing hybrid teams inclusively to evolving employee expectations will be a proving ground for leaders to demonstrate that they have the leadership skills and methods— such as managing to outcomes and emphasizing social compacts—that can deliver effective solutions.

Amid this flux and experimentation, we believe that widespread employee support for hybrid work suggests that to navigate the present time of transition, leaders should first tap more deeply into their employees’ preferences, needs, and expectations. This requires, at a minimum, setting guidelines and encouraging managers to collect employee feedback regularly as part of experiments with new, agile approaches. Leaders can then incorporate the results into several sound inclusion practices that our research points to as a strong foundation for an inclusive hybrid workplace.

Building the inclusive hybrid workplace

Data are useful to understand the working-model preferences of an organization’s different demographic groups. We also know that the way managers and teams behave day-to-day is the most powerful determinant of the individual employee experience. Regardless of working model, inclusive organizational cultures that foster trust and a sense of support increase retention, collaboration, and job satisfaction (Exhibit 2).

Improving diversity and representation in a sustainable way is difficult without inclusion— embracing, supporting, and enabling employees to make meaningful contributions. Without an inclusive environment, even an organization with a diverse employee population will probably struggle to improve its long-term performance. The widespread adoption of hybrid work has complicated the struggle to build and maintain such cultures.

Without an inclusive environment, even an organization with a diverse employee population will probably struggle to improve its long-term performance.

To test the workplace models that employees desire, our research asked them which scientifically validated inclusion practices  they want their organizations to work hardest to improve as part of a hybrid work model. Remarkably, a clear consensus emerged across all demographic groups 4 For example, across racial and ethnic groups, sexual orientation, gender identities, age, and caregiving status. around three areas:

• work–life support: demonstrating appreciation for employees’ nonwork demands, responsibilities, and interests
• team building: working to foster trust, collaboration, and healthy conflict among team members
• mutual respect: showing genuine concern for the well-being of all employees, and a commitment by employees to treat one another fairly and respectfully

These practices underpin fundamental employee preferences that we have seen time and again in studying workplace inclusion: agency, autonomy, empowerment, and support for employees to do their best work. It’s important to note that the way different groups and individuals experience these practices can vary widely, complicating implementation. For example, work–life support could mean parental leave for some employees struggling with caregiving chores, and for others it could mean more flexible hours to pursue personal passions. Nonetheless, during the pandemic, survey respondents working in hybrid models saw improvements in these areas, and we believe leaders should consider them the backbone of any inclusive hybrid work model, backed by better communication and role modeling (Exhibit 3).

Work–life support

The pandemic has prompted employees to broadly reassess their work–life trade-offs. This reassessment has fueled resignations and a search for organizational cultures that emphasize well-being  and more purposeful work. Nearly 60 percent of our survey respondents working in hybrid models ranked work–life support in the top inclusion practices they want their organizations to improve—the highest percentage across the 17 inclusion practices we measured. In other words, employees are clamoring for greater acknowledgment and support for their myriad demands, responsibilities, and interests outside work.

At an organization-wide level, nearly half of the respondents recommended prioritizing policies that support flexibility—including extended parental leave, sick leave, flexible hours, and work-from-home policies. Some respondents highlighted the value of paid time off for newly recognized celebrations, such as Juneteenth, or unexpected occurrences, like COVID-19 sick days.

Many if not most companies are also experimenting with semipermanent policies on flexible locations. For example, one tech company now allows employees to work up to four weeks each year remotely from any location within their current country. A consumer goods company adopted a “work from wherever” policy, permanently giving employees the flexibility to work from a location of their own choice (assuming steady performance). Employers are also experimenting with traditionally on-site roles. One Asian consumer goods company reimagined its retail model and cross-trained sales associates as social-media influencers, allowing them to split their time between on-site and virtual work.

Management support is also critical for employees who want more accommodating work–life policies. Small actions play a huge role in how safe employees feel when they exercise these benefits, and when they assess whether a benefit change is more than mere lip service. One powerful signal: managers who model flexibility and support the various work–life options, especially in a hybrid model. Colleagues also play a role in reinforcing a culture of work–life support when they validate acceptable behavior: employees can encourage one another to use mental-health benefits, leave policies, and other ways of setting healthier boundaries between work and personal life. The effect on workplace culture can be dramatic when colleagues hear peers share their ideas and experiences in the journey toward work–life balance or when they crowdsource solutions to common challenges. Newer colleagues often find this especially helpful.

Team building

Our survey respondents placed team building behind work–life support as a priority inclusion practice in the hybrid workplace. As much as employees value its flexibility and benefits, it can also promote isolation, especially when team cohesion is lacking. Some research suggests that remote work can also lead to more static and siloed collaboration . In light of such effects, half of our survey respondents not surprisingly assigned great importance to intentionally building stronger teams.

Effective team builders foster trust, collaboration, and healthy conflict. Respondents recommended three ways to help achieve these goals: encouraging employees to know one another and how they get work done, creating buddy systems, and coaching employees through effective conflict management. To build psychological safety  and deep connections in teams, leaders must embed team-building activities and norms in the organization’s ways of working.

Team events where everyone feels welcome can also help build bonds in ways that make employees feel close and valued. To stage these events effectively, it is necessary to dig into details: dietary restrictions, comfort with alcohol, event timing, accessibility needs, types of activities, and more. Moreover, managers should be mindful of how much they ask employees to sacrifice their “off” hours—requests that can diminish team cohesion rather than contribute to it.

Respondents also highlighted the importance of integrating new team members in hybrid work environments. Some managers do so by setting up discussions, whenever a new member joins the team, to discuss working styles, preferences, and roles across the group. One pharmaceutical company formalized a peer “buddy” process by having an experienced colleague connect twice each week with the new hire to address common questions. One financial-services organization set up weekly coffee chats among new hires and company representatives to break down silos.

Mutual respect

In hybrid work, in-person interactions are fewer and communication outside real time is more common. As a result, it can be harder to feel connected to colleagues and easier for miscommunication to occur. Our survey respondents may have had such experiences in mind when they pegged mutual respect as one of the three priority inclusion practices. We define mutual respect as demonstrating genuine concern for the well-being of all employees and a commitment to treat one another fairly and respectfully. Coaching such behavior can be difficult at times, but our respondents had suggestions for how to encourage it.

First, create norms that encourage employees to view one another as human beings, not merely coworkers. Inquire about each employee’s preferences and boundaries for working styles and communication. For hybrid work, this is likely to include some experimentation with mixing different types of meetings, when (and when not) to bring employees together on-site, and resetting team norms about when to check in.

A check-in should be more than just a review of upcoming to-dos, our respondents noted. Make it easy for employees to share personal updates, both positive and negative (for example, “What else is going on in your world? How are you?”). This is a critical way to express care and appreciation for employees as they navigate complex work–life boundaries in hybrid work. One manager we talked to has a habit of saying, “I’m not a mind reader. Please tell me what is going on so we can work through it together.”

Second, foster a culture that encourages employees to learn with and from one another. Reframe mistakes as opportunities to identify what can be improved. Such efforts might include training employees on how to adopt a “ growth mindset ” that encourages teamwide development. Managers should also encourage two-way feedback to let employees voice what is going well and what could use improvement. Whatever the form of feedback, everyone should feel comfortable sharing both positive and negative observations.

Finally, respondents noted, celebrate and amplify employee contributions and create an environment that regularly recognizes such moments. Seek out achievements (such as well-organized events or team members who coached peers) that many traditional reward and recognition systems take for granted. One medical-services company started a “shout-outs” channel on its internal messaging app to let employees recall times when colleagues excelled or made exceptional contributions as teammates. It then periodically highlighted these moments again during all-group meetings.

Empowered employees who have tasted the benefits of hybrid work seem determined to retain them. Employers now face a risk/reward moment to reimagine a more flexible, inclusive hybrid work model that dovetails with an organization’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. This will not be easy work. But for leaders who show the sensitivity, creativity, and humility  needed to shape a new hybrid work model, there could be dramatic gains in performance, organizational cohesion, and improved employee wellness, engagement, and retention.

Bonnie Dowling is an expert associate partner in McKinsey’s Denver office, Drew Goldstein is a solution associate partner in the Miami office, Michael Park is a senior partner in the New York office, and Holly Price is a knowledge expert in the Houston office.

The authors would like to thank Shannon Cheng, Ruth Imose, Vidya Mahadevan, and Brooke Weddle for their contributions to this article.

This article was edited by Bill Javetski, an executive editor in the New Jersey office.

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