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Leading teams in a hybrid work environment is still a relatively new science — and presents many types of challenges. Hybrid team leaders need to identify the best team norms around communication, refine the workplace culture to foster collaboration and community, decide on smart ways to manage accountability, and more.

However, hybrid work also presents valuable opportunities for leaders trying to deliver on ambitious business goals. Hybrid work teams enjoy more flexibility and work-life balance, experience increased productivity and focus, and ultimately realize improved employee satisfaction and retention, compared with fully onsite workers. These benefits are tangible and wide-reaching, according to Jordan Birnbaum, an industrial and organizational psychologist and behavioral economist. “When employees are engaged, they try harder, and it shows up everywhere that matters: profitability, productivity, innovation, customer satisfaction, safety, and retention,” he asserted in a recent MIT SMR article.

Seven Hybrid Work Tips: Expert Advice

If you’re the leader of a team that includes remote and in-office workers, 2025 is the year to focus on new management strategies and skills that will foster stronger communication, camaraderie, and culture. This might mean engaging in more intentional discussions about hybrid work policies, shifting employee measurement standards, or giving teams more autonomy over their in-office and remote schedules. It should also mean discussing boundaries and ensuring that your organization’s managers at all levels have the tools they need to lead hybrid teams successfully.

To help you do just that and start the new year off right, we’ve gathered some of the best advice from hybrid work experts who have shared their insights with MIT SMR over the past year. Consider this a concise guide to help you build a stronger hybrid team in 2025.

1. Communicate hybrid work policies transparently.

“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.”

Read the full article: “Seven Truths About Hybrid Work and Productivity,” by Lynda Gratton.

2. Measure success based on outcomes, not activity or inputs.

“Management by walking around doesn’t work when teams are distributed. Monitoring hours or keystrokes makes it worse: Employees spend their time gaming the system through coffee badging and using mouse jigglers. To close the gap, focus on outcomes. Employees are most productive and engaged when they’re given the flexibility and trust to manage their schedules and are judged based on the outcomes they’ve committed to. Companies can also leverage the entrepreneurial spirit and youthful energy of Gen Z by reframing goals for the company as challenges that they can help solve. Clarify the end goal, but leave gray space in how goals will be achieved. Then publicly and authentically reward progress toward those goals.”

Read the full article: “When Hybrid Work Strategy Aggravates 20-Somethings,” by Brian Elliott and Amanda Schneider.

3. Let business units and teams, not CEOs, determine in-person schedules.

“The patterns of what interactions work best in person vary across both organizations and functions. Every business function likely has its own key times when being in the same room is more meaningful. For example, the finance team may gather for the monthly and quarterly close of the books. Regional sales teams may have weekly anchor days for practicing pitches. Members of the legal team who work on commercial deals may come together with the sales team during the last five days of each sales quarter. Roles that are more of what I call the ‘glue layer’ of a company — including product management, product marketing, and program management — all tend to need more in-person time with their teams.”

Read the full article: “Hybrid Work: How Leaders Build In-Person Moments That Matter,” by Brian Elliott.

4. Discuss boundaries around communication outside of work hours.

“When you have conversations with employees about boundaries, consider your role as both someone who can be interrupted and be the interrupter. Get curious. Ask your team members about their working hours and when, if at all, they consider it appropriate, necessary, or reasonable for you to contact them outside of that period. Likewise, explicitly set expectations for gaining access to your personal time and attention.”

Read the full article: “Manage Boundaries Better With Your Team,” by Angela R. Grotto, Maura J. Mills, and Erin M. Eatough.

5. Make time for personal connection at the start of virtual meetings.

“If you get down to business right at the start of a meeting, you obliterate your opportunity to nurture your most important assets: human relationships. The first five minutes of every virtual meeting — whether one-on-ones, team meetings, sales meetings, or client meetings — must be devoted to personal connection. And five minutes is only a guide. If your connection is organically taking you past five minutes, let it. There is no better ROI for your career than connecting personally with the people in your network.”

Read the full article: “Building Human Connection in a Remote World,” by Jordan Birnbaum.

6. Seek support for leaders of hybrid teams.

“Senior leaders in the organization need to find a way to provide some support to their managers. They’re the ones that are burned out. If you’re not providing your managers [with] any kind of training or any kind of guidance in how to lead distributed teams, you end up with people sitting at polar extremes. You end up with people who figure it out for themselves because they’ve got a mentor or a guide, or they’ve seen it done someplace else, and they get really good at it. Or you end up with people who fall back on what feels comfortable for them, which might be ‘I want you back in the office five days a week so I can monitor you because I’ve never learned a different way.’ Both of those extremes are risky because you’ve got the vast bulk of people in the middle that are really asking for help.”

Watch the full video: “Hybrid Work: Surprising Lessons From Gen Z,” featuring Brian Elliott.

7. Understand the realities of return-to-office mandates.

“If you look at some of the other research out there, even when a [return-to-office] policy is put in place, you still end up with a sub-50% compliance perspective, and we all get the reason why. A mandate and a policy from the top results in a conversation that every manager dreads, which is, when those things come out, there’s two weeks of extremely low productivity while you sort out with your boss ‘How does this apply to me?’

“‘Will you actually crack down on people?’ is a key question. You may crack down on some people in some parts of the organization that you’re trying to shrink, but you’re going to let it go with people that are your top performers in key roles that you know you need to show more flexibility to because you can’t afford to lose them. At this point, you’re not an executive making this decision without realizing that some people are going to leave on a voluntary basis. And this is, in fact, in some ways, a soft layoff. About a third of HR executives who were polled earlier this year said that mandates are a form of soft layoff.”

Watch the full video: “RTO Mandates: Hard Truths for Leaders,” featuring Brian Elliott.

The post "Seven Essential Hybrid Work Tips for Leaders in 2025" appeared first on MIT Sloan Management Review