The different types of hybrid work
Hybrid work is an employee work schedule where employees divide their work time between the office and a remote location (typically at home, but not always).
Hybrid work is supposed to combine some of the flexibility of remote work, with the face-to-face communication and collaboration of being in the office with your colleagues.
There are different ways for companies to structure a hybrid work schedule, depending on the company’s culture and objectives.
The Fixed Model (Company-Led)
In this model, the organization mandates specific in-office days for all employees or for specific teams.
This is often implemented as a split-week schedule, such as Google’s requirement for three in-office days.
However, some companies require employees to come in office once per week, or even once or twice a month.
The primary advantage is predictability; it allows the organization to maximize the use of office space and guarantees that collaboration days involve a critical mass of employees.
The drawback is its rigidity, which offers the least employee flexibility and runs the highest risk of clashing with worker preferences.
The Flexible Model (Employee-Led)
This model offers maximum flexibility. Companies typically decide how many days the employees must work from the office, but the employees are allowed to choose when they come into the office.
The advantages are high employee autonomy, satisfaction, and work-life balance. The disadvantages are purely logistical.
It requires careful coordination and a robust technological framework (e.g., desk reservation systems ) to prevent the empty office phenomenon, where the company maintains expensive real estate that goes unused.
The Manager-Led Model (Team-Led)
This model allows managers to create hybrid work schedules for their teams, based on project needs.
In theory, this system is a middle option between the company deciding on a rigid schedule and the employee being free to choose his own when to come into the office.
Unfortunately, the outcome of this type of hybrid model strongly depends on the manager who decides the hybrid work schedule.
It creates a black box of operational and cultural risk by replacing a clear, universal policy with the subjective, and potentially biased, decisions of hundreds of individual managers.
This can lead to significant dissatisfaction among employees when two teams with similar functions have vastly different flexibility, simply because of manager decisions.
The advantages of hybrid work
Over the past few years, numerous studies have shown that hybrid work brings measurable returns across employee satisfaction, productivity, finance, and operational performance.
Hybrid work improves employee satisfaction and retention
In recent years, work schedule flexibility has become a major demand of employee to the companies they work for.
The preference for flexibility is overwhelming. Study after study has shown that employees overwhelmingly prefer a remote or hybrid workplace, such as this study from Gartner.
The data on employee retention is even more striking. The 2024 Stanford study of 1,600 Trip.com workers found that shifting to a hybrid schedule (two days work-from-home) reduced employee attrition by 33%.
Notably, this reduction in turnover was strongest among women, non-managers, and employees with long commutes, demonstrating a direct and positive impact on diversity and inclusion goals.
By comparison, a rigid, mandated return-to-office (RTO) policies actively drive away an organization’s most valuable talent.
The employees who are most confident in the quality of their work, have the most mobility in the job market, and are the most resistant to oppressive managers (in other words, the high performers) are the first to leave.
This can create a downward spiral where leadership, observing a decline in performance from the remaining workforce, incorrectly blames hybrid work and mandates even stricter policies, accelerating the talent drain and emptying the company of its best human capital.
Hybrid work reduces costs for physical offices
Hybrid work to reduce one of the largest fixed costs for most corporations: real estate.
These savings are not theoretical; they are proven and substantial.
- Cisco reported saving approximately $500 million by cutting its real estate office space in half.
- Allstate similarly cut its real estate spending by 50% after embracing flexible work.
- Neiman Marcus Group decreased its office footprint by nearly 80%, focusing on smaller, more intentional collaboration spaces.
- IBM previously slashed its real estate costs by $50 million through similar flexible work programs.
These studies point towards a big shift in market trends. Office attendance in major cities has stabilized at 30-50% below pre-pandemic levels.
To realize the real estate savings identified above, companies should move from a 1:1 assigned seating model to a shared-resource model, commonly known as reserving or sharing a desk.
In a desk reservation model, employees do not have an assigned desk. They reserve a desk as needed, typically through a software-based reservation system. With office utilization rates hovering around 50% , this model allows companies to eliminate unused desks and optimize real estate usage, dramatically reducing overhead costs.
Hybrid work improves productivity
The most controversial aspect of hybrid work, its impact on productivity, is also the area with the most robust, positive, and conclusive data.
Critics argue that worker productivity will suffer if employees are not in the office. The evidence, however, contradicts this.
Studies such as the previously mentioned Stanford/Trip.com found a small increase in productivity for IT employees, and no productivity loss for other employee categories.
This productivity boost is caused by two main factors:
Focused Deep Work: Employees report fewer interruptions during remote days, allowing for focused deep work sessions. Office days can then be strategically used for collaborative tasks, creating an optimized rhythm.
Wellbeing and Time Recapture: The top advantages of hybrid work are improved work-life balance, more efficient use of time, and burnout mitigation. A significant part of this is the elimination of the commute. The average one-way commute is 27.6 minutes, which adds up to nearly 20 hours per month, time that hybrid work gives back to the employee.
The disadvantages of hybrid work
Hybrid work doesn’t just come with net benefits. There are some costs and operational problems associated with hybrid work that should be taken into account.
Costly and complex initial setup
The financial savings from real estate are not pure profit. A significant portion of those savings must be reinvested into robust and secure collaboration technology for the days of remote work.
Cloud storage is essential for hybrid work, because it makes vital company data accessible and protected for an employee wherever they are located.
Network security is another important aspect. A distributed workforce using unsecured home Wi-Fi or personal devices offers many opportunities for cyber-attacks. A robust security policy, including VPNs and zero-trust protocols, is essential.
Hybrid work also requires many collaboration tools. This includes chat, video, task management and asynchronous file-sharing platforms (such as Microsoft 365, including Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive).
IT teams must have also have the tools and processes to support employees from a distance, including remote device management and troubleshooting.
The single greatest logistical, financial, and security challenge of a hybrid workforce is managing the hardware fleet. Device-as-a-Service (DaaS), such as the one we offer at [INKI](https://inki.tech/the-service?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=organic&utm_content=hybrid-work), has emerged as the most effective strategic solution.
DaaS is a subscription-based model where companies pay a predictable, per-user fee to a provider. That provider handles the entire device lifecycle: procurement, deployment, software management, maintenance, repair, and secure end-of-life disposal.
DaaS transforms a large, unpredictable Capital Expenditure (CapEx) into a smooth, predictable Operating Expenditure (OpEx), freeing up capital for other investments.
The problem with reserving a work desk
Desk sharing is a necessary strategy to reduce real estate costs in a hybrid model.
This is because desk sharing allows companies with 50 employees to rent an office with 10-15 desks. The employees then share the desks depending on what day they come into the office.
The problem with desk sharing is that it presents significant human and logistical challenges. If not managed carefully, these problems can lead to employee frustration, lost productivity, and a sense of disconnection from the company.
The biggest problem is usually employee resistance, because not all workers like having to share their desk.
An assigned desk provides a sense of stability and permanence. Desk sharing removes this, making the office feel impersonal. Employees can no longer personalize their workspace or use it as a home away from home.
Operationally, the greatest risk of desk sharing is chaos. Without a robust and strictly enforced desk reservation system, employees may arrive at the office only to find no available desks, leading to frustration and wasted time. This makes a reliable booking system an absolute prerequisite for the model to function.
Finally, desk sharing simply doesn’t work for certain departments. Teams that require specialized equipment, such as design or IT development, or those that handle sensitive, confidential information, like legal or finance departments, need to have separate desks.
Forcing these teams into a shared-desk environment can hinder their specific workflows or even create privacy and security risks. In these cases, dedicated, assigned desks may still be necessary, requiring a more complex, mixed-model approach to office layout.
Impact on company culture and collaboration
A major problem of complete remote work is its negative impact on company culture and collaboration, since colleagues are far apart from one another.
This greatly reduces the number of spontaneous conversations and interactions between employees, which leads to static and slow-moving organizations that aren’t as innovative.
A hybrid work schedule can solve this problem, but only the models that require employees to be in the office 2 or 3 days a week.
This means companies that require 1 day per week or less of work from the office might not get any major benefit of in-person collaboration. However, they must still invest the same amount of time and effort into setting up a remote work infrastructure.
Onboarding new employees can be challenging
Onboarding new employees for companies that have hybrid work schedules is more challenging and complex compared to a company that works entirely from the office.
A successful hybrid onboarding program must be more structured and higher-touch than a traditional in-person one.
The manager is the new hire’s primary anchor. New hires are much more likely to be satisfied with their onboarding experience if their manager plays an active role. This means early and often one-on-one check-ins.
The partner system is a popular and effective solution to the problem of new employees being unable to integrate because there’s no one around to chat with.
The partner system assigns a colleague to show them the ropes, answer their questions, and help them get to know the team.
The onboarding partner is not just a company social program. It is a deliberate knowledge management strategy.
For new employees, the biggest challenges are about company organization: who to ask for what, how things really get done, and how to navigate office politics.
Conclusion
In conclusion, hybrid work offers proven benefits in talent retention, cost savings, and productivity. However, companies must successfully manage the high costs of tech setup, the logistical challenges of shared desks, and the potential risks to company culture.
