#450 Why Hybrid Work Depends on Great Leadership - Article by Niels Brabandt
Why Hybrid Work Depends on Great Leadership
By Niels Brabandt
When executives argue about hybrid work, the debate is often framed as a matter of productivity, culture, or convenience. Yet new research from the MIT Sloan Management Review makes one thing clear: Hybrid work is not the problem. Poor leadership is.
For years, organisations have oscillated between enthusiasm for remote flexibility and nostalgia for the office. But what drives the success or failure of hybrid models is not the number of days spent at a desk, it is the quality of leadership guiding the people who work there.
The Evidence Is Clear, Opinion Is Not Fact
As the MIT Sloan article shows, the call to “return to the office” often emerges not from data, but from echo chambers among executives. Leaders attend conferences where other CEOs advocate physical presence, and they return convinced that “everyone else” is doing it. The result: policy decisions made on anecdote and assumption rather than evidence.
This is leadership by opinion, and it is failing.
In contrast, leadership by evidence acknowledges that hybrid work, when designed with clarity, trust, and measurable outcomes, functions remarkably well. The research confirms what employees have been signalling for years: flexibility works when leadership works.
Leadership’s Filter Bubble
Modern executives often live in what social scientists call a filter bubble, a narrow perception shaped by privilege and hierarchy. They imagine they understand the daily realities of others, yet their experiences are profoundly different. Leaders with financial stability, private offices, and tailored schedules may sincerely believe that everyone else’s professional life looks similar. It doesn’t.
This disconnect drives many misguided return-to-office mandates. When a CEO assumes that “collaboration only happens in person,” they reveal more about their own working habits than about their workforce. True leadership begins with recognising those blind spots, and listening beyond the boardroom.
The Echo Chamber of Management
An echo chamber reinforces belief rather than testing it. Within many leadership teams, dissenting voices are quietly discouraged. Data that contradicts a narrative is dismissed as “not relevant.” Yet leadership that refuses to hear uncomfortable truths becomes detached from reality, a phenomenon we’ve seen not only in corporate offices but in politics and academia alike.
Hybrid work exposes this flaw. It demands transparency, accountability, and results-based assessment, qualities that weak leadership finds threatening. When managers rely on physical presence as a proxy for performance, they reveal their own insecurity, not their employees’ inefficiency.
Skills, Environment, and Credibility
Making hybrid work succeed requires three essential conditions:
Competence: Teams must possess the right skills, and leaders must invest in their development. Many managers still struggle with digital literacy, collaboration tools, or even basic data analysis. If employees cannot operate autonomously, the problem lies in training, not geography.
Environment: The office must offer genuine value. Asking employees to commute for “culture” while seating them in cubicles or open-plan noise is dishonest. If the office mirrors home, or worse, people will stay home. A credible work environment attracts, not enforces, attendance.
Consistency and Credibility: Leaders must walk the talk. A bank executive promoting office real estate investments cannot credibly champion remote work, but the opposite is also true. Authenticity in decision-making builds trust; hypocrisy destroys it.
The Business Case for Evidence-Based Leadership
Empirical studies, such as those by Professor Tsedal Neeley of Harvard Business School, show that hybrid models enhance performance when anchored in structure and clarity. Her research, summarised in Remote Work Revolution, outlines precisely how communication, accountability, and team design determine outcomes, not physical location.
For leaders, this means rethinking what leadership actually measures. Employees should be evaluated on results, not hours spent at a desk. If output meets expectations, micromanaging presence is not leadership, it is control theatre.
Case by Case: The Smart Way Forward
A mature hybrid policy recognises that not every job can or should be remote. The receptionist cannot greet clients from home; the field salesperson already works anywhere. What matters is an evidence-based, role-specific approach, not an ideological one.
Where flexibility is feasible, it becomes a competitive advantage. Organisations that reject hybrid work out of principle will simply lose talent. Younger professionals, and indeed most high performers, now choose employers that respect autonomy and trust.
The Leadership Imperative
Hybrid work is a mirror. It reveals who leads with trust and who leads with fear. It separates those who manage outcomes from those who manage appearances. The future of work will not be decided by slogans like “Return to Office” but by leaders capable of aligning science, empathy, and strategy.
As the MIT Sloan evidence underscores, hybrid work fails only where leadership fails first.
About the Author
Niels Brabandt is the Owner and Founder of NB Networks, based in Zurich and London. He works internationally as a speaker, trainer, coach, consultant, and author on the topic of Sustainable Leadership. His weekly Leadership Podcast and Leadership Videocast are available on all major platforms.
Learn more at www.NB-Networks.biz.
Niels Brabandt
---
More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the videocast’s and podcast’s transcript, read below this article.
Is excellent leadership important to you?
Let's have a chat: NB@NB-Networks.com
Contact: Niels Brabandt on LinkedIn
Website: www.NB-Networks.biz
Niels Brabandt is an expert in sustainable leadership with more than 20 years of experience in practice and science.
Niels Brabandt: Professional Training, Speaking, Coaching, Consulting, Mentoring, Project & Interim Management. Event host, MC, moderator.
Niels Brabandt
---
More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the videocast’s and podcast’s transcript, read below this article.
Is excellent leadership important to you?
Let's have a chat: NB@NB-Networks.com
Contact: Niels Brabandt on LinkedIn
Website: www.NB-Networks.biz
Niels Brabandt is an expert in sustainable leadership with more than 20 years of experience in practice and science.
Niels Brabandt: Professional Training, Speaking, Coaching, Consulting, Mentoring, Project & Interim Management. Event host, MC, moderator.
Niels Brabandt
---
More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the videocast’s and podcast’s transcript, read below this article.
Is excellent leadership important to you?
Let's have a chat: NB@NB-Networks.com
Contact: Niels Brabandt on LinkedIn
Website: www.NB-Networks.biz
Niels Brabandt is an expert in sustainable leadership with more than 20 years of experience in practice and science.
Niels Brabandt: Professional Training, Speaking, Coaching, Consulting, Mentoring, Project & Interim Management. Event host, MC, moderator.
Podcast Transcript
Niels Brabandt
And today we're going to talk about something people actually asked me for quite a while to talk about. We quite often said something about or talked about remote work or work from home or work from anywhere. And people often ask me, could you have a specific episode about hybrid work? And yes, I always planned to have one, but I was waiting for one thing to happen. And today, or better to say, this week it happened, the MIT Sloan Review published Exactly on that matter. And I always want to have the scientific evidence next to it because my opinion, we all know consultants, trainers, coaches, mentors, call it as you like, we have a strong opinion on something, but strong opinion doesn't make anything true. And that is something that people always need to keep in mind.
Today, we're going to talk about hybrid work and why great leadership is a must-have for it. And I'm going to quote from the MIT Sloan Review here. Very important here. That's the disclaimer for it. I can quote this. I can show this when you watch this on YouTube. I will show the real article here.
And this is all under the Fair Use Act. And of course, also the German speaking world fully compliant with the law. When we now see that the MIT Sloan evidence published on this, and just to give you a hint of what we're doing here, I'm working scientifically here because I know what happens. I say something from the MIT Sloan Management Review and quite quickly people will send me an email and say, Mr. Bund, I have a different opinion on this. I just have a really different take on that. Okay, here news.
You can have any opinion you like. However, your opinion is not scientific evidence. And of course, there's a reason why people want to have a different opinion on that. Because when the MIT Sloan Review says hybrid work is not the problem, poor leadership is, that is of course a headline leaders often do not like to hear. However, we are spiralling downwards when it comes to the quality of leadership we see in the real world out there. And the The very best thing about this article, it's a great article, you find it easily on the internet and publicly published. It is the start of the article.
When the start of the article says, My CEO came back from another CEO event and he's on rampage about return to office. I cannot tell you how many messages, how many emails, how many voice notes I received. Almost word by word, exactly that. My manager, my leader, went to some event and came back and said, they all need to return to the office. And the question is, why does this happen? So we are now going to talk about hybrid work and why leadership is important. First, of course, we need to look at the situation.
What's the situation right now? And the situation is that some people say, RTO, of course, we immediately have a fancy abbreviation for that because management and leadership loves to use abbreviation. When you enter, Today's corporate world, no matter where you work, you basically need six months to understand the abbreviations. And sometimes, in the same organisation and different departments, they have the same abbreviations, but meaning something completely different. So the main point here, when you have a point of return to office, you can do that. However, you always have to tell people why. When you suddenly say, we have to return to the office, and let's just give you one example.
When you are Jamie Dimon from Goldman Sachs, Or from any other bank, you're one of these senior leaders and you say, Hey, look, we are massively invested into real estate. One of our main assets are office estates. And I don't think our bank is very credible when we say, Hey, please invest in our office real estate while we all work from home. Perfect. That's perfectly fine. But please frame it that way. Please frame it that way and say, We sell office space.
We sell investment into office spaces. So we need to live by the office space.
That's just credibility. It's like someone who owns the gym and doesn't go to the gym is not very credible. So very important is walk the talk. And when you have such any kind of any kind of good storyline around that it's a starting point. However, often people simply come back and say, oh, we need to return because I saw this other bloke from the other organization, they do something completely different, but I don't care. So they returned to the office and they they said it's massively successful. By the way, if it weren't successful, they wouldn't tell you during their meeting. Surprise, surprise.
So often people just hang out in their filter bubble and then they have an echo chamber just echoing whatever they think. And that is the situation we have right now. A filter bubble means that lots of realities we have on this planet are not part of management or leadership reality. I give you a very simple example. Probably you heard certain leaders and I can tell you when I was a young manager, I said the same shame on me for that. When people say something like, oh, yeah, I can imagine with with the job you have and the income you have, it must be really hard to be a single parent.
Yeah, I can feel that. No, you can't. Very straightforward. No, you can't. I have no idea how it is on a lower tier income with the situation of being a single parent. I have absolutely no idea how it is. And here the news, no one else can.
So please don't pretend that you do. The filter bubble means that often you have certain circumstances who are nothing else than the result either of your actions, your career or Nothing else than where you were growing up, where you were growing up. It's nothing else than birthright privileges, getting access to certain people. And you think this is the reality. You just show up a bit and you meet people and suddenly you have a career. I got it, so why didn't other people get it? No, that's not how the world works.
We need to reflect on our filter bubbles and our echo chambers because an echo chamber simply means you have a group of people and they all agree on the matter. Usually they agree by a certain opinion leadership because that person has something on their mind or in their pocket that you want to have, need to have or has influence on you. That is the downfall of large organizations. When you suddenly think there is one person in the room they know it all, we just follow, that is always the downfall. Echo chambers are nothing else than enforcing a standardised opinion. When you say today, let's make something up, you say, the sun is green. Go on social media and you will find groups that the sun is green.
2,000 people in there, and you think they can't be all wrong, right? There are groups who say, oh, the moon doesn't exist.
It's just projected into space. There are people who say the moon landing never happened. These are all people who are 11 out of 10 on the clueless scale. However, they are just enforcing each other, saying, We can't be all wrong, huh? So filter bubble and echo chambers are a huge issue at the moment. When I hear people talking and say, oh, basically all the companies are returning to the office now, no. They don't.
There is no scientific evidence to that. It is just that people returning to the office get more pressed because it is something new. When people say, Hey, the news is people work from home and hear the news, they still do. That's not news. The news is calling people back to the office. Often, by the way, it sounds better to say return to the office than laying people off. It was Amazon who called people back to the office, and suddenly when they returned back to the office, they didn't have enough desks in the building and had to send people back or lay them off.
So not enough people obviously quit. So here we are. So Filter Bubble and Echo Chamber, be aware of that because unfortunately we have a strong move towards pseudoscientific or anti-science behavior. People think that their experience, their opinion, simply their words or them being themselves is enough to have expertise. And the world is led by science. Proper facts are found out by science. The reality, as we can perceive it right now with the means we have right now, is defined by science.
And anything besides that is an opinion. I'm now sitting here. I'm actually working on my third master's degree at the moment, and I'm writing a doctorate degree afterwards. So I don't say I'm world leading scientist. I will never claim that I am. There are way better scientists out there than I am. However, with the experiences I have and the career I have, plus the scientific evidence, I think I'm not the worst person in the world.
When I claim something. And when people simply say, my opinion is better than your opinion, and you might have scientific evidence, but I have my opinion and I'm higher on the hierarchy, so here I win, then you shouldn't be surprised that people will leave your organisation because no one is up for that nonsense.
So how can we improve right now? How can you make hybrid work actually work? And the first thing you have to do is you need to know what is your skill set. Because you need to know the team skill set and the individual skill set. Why do you need to do that? Because when people People hang out in the office and they can't do something very well. Often people help each other and they figure it out somehow.
When suddenly now sit at home, people sit at home, they are just stranded, they can't do anything. Team and individual skills need to be up to the standard. Either you hire the people who have the skills, usually that comes with a price tag, or you hire great talent, you qualify them, or when you now say, hey, we have people here for quite a while, but we didn't do too much training back in the days, and you have to qualify them right now. I can tell you, I'm always quite shocked when I'm still delivering training sessions even now. Since the end of the 90s, I'm wondering about that. I'm still sitting in management rounds where people, when I open a Microsoft Excel sheet and a training about the right KPIs, and people don't know what an HLOOKUP or a VLOOKUP is or an XLOOKUP is in Microsoft Excel. They have absolutely no idea.
I think there's a pretty basic skill, not an expert skill here, but don't get into Microsoft Excel too much here. You need to update the skills so people are able to help themselves to the level where they should be. That is something that you need to do first. Second is, you need to have a work environment where actually people like to go to. When, for example, we have companies such as Aktion Kommunikation, which is one of the largest leading communication agencies and advertising agencies in the Federal Republic of Germany, and their CEO, Marco Kaminski, when he says, During the pandemic, I knew people will not return to the office because A, we see it's working from home, B, people know it's less travel and less time and see why should they come to the office when they find exactly the same as they have at home or probably even worse. And that is someone who understood how things work. That's, by the way, also one of the many reasons why he is successful with that.
You need to have a great work environment. And when you say, oh, people need to come back to the office for the culture. And then people come back and there are long hallways, then there are doors left and right with name tags, probably room numbers on the door. And inside these rooms are cubicles and you're working like in the 70s, 80s, 90s, people have their personal private two square meters. And you say it's all about the culture.
That's just straightforward lying. And when you say it's all for the culture and you all put them in one huge office and you always frame it like, oh, we have these large offices for collaboration and cooperation. And people know it's only about you don't want to spend money on anything with construction. Architecture is expensive. Construction is expensive, especially today. And you don't want to spend a penny on that. You just put chairs and desks in a room and say, it's collaboration, cooperation, yada, yada, yada, yada, and then you just move on.
And you can just move tables around and people just sit in a noisy environment and don't care. They basically can't hear themselves thinking.
So here you are. The work environment has to be great. I know that workplace consulting is expensive, however, it pays off royally. You need to be aware the work environment needs to be great. Just saying, and that is something I heard way too often. Just last week, someone again said, by the way, that was on LinkedIn. Someone said, oh, if someone asks for remote work or hybrid work, we immediately chuck them out of the recruiting process.
Well, you can do that. It's not illegal to do that. However, I really wish you great recruiting but just because certainly you will need them.
Most people offer an option. I offer my people remote work up to 100% working from home or working from anywhere. So here you are. So when you compete about an assistant in your office and you compete with me, I wish you good luck. I pay the same as you do, or probably even more, and they can work from wherever they want. They only need internet access and we give them anything they need. And you sit there and say, oh no, you have to come to the office for the culture.
And by the way, here's your desk in a 300 people large room. So good luck from here for the culture. So the work environment needs to be great. And when you now say, okay, I think we're on a good way doing that, then you still, and that's an important point that the other side of the game always has to see, it's always a case by case decision. When someone says, Hey, like to work from home or have hybrid work, and you say, Hey, what's your job? And they say, yeah, I'm an in-field salesperson. You probably say, Hey, you're travelling all the time anyway, when you just want to do all the computer work from your desk at home instead of in the office. Perfect, fine.
No issue with that. Then people say, Hey, I'm an engineer and I'm usually working in the office. Then you can say, Hey, can you access our someone is in accounting and wants to do work from home or work from anywhere, you can say, Hey, can we access the different programmes from all over the world?
Is that GDPR compliant? Is it data security compliant? Is it compliant with local laws, regulations? Probably you need to check how long can they stay in certain countries. Without the need of having social contributions or paying taxes there. That all needs to be checked and then you can decide. And sometimes people might say, Hey, I'm a receptionist.
Can I work from home? And you probably have to say, Sorry, no, you can't. Because we can't send clients to your home and then tell them which room number they have to visit for the meeting. That's just not realistic. So very important here is that the case by case decision needs to be made. And both sides have to see that when the other side has a credible point where they say, What you want to do from home is not realistic, please accept that. It's a both-sided game.
However, it's all led by facts, proof and evidence, not just by strong opinions. Something like, I don't want that. I don't know if you work at home, which is basically the abolishment of the assumption of innocence. When people work and they bring the results, always focus. And that's extremely important. You always focus on results, not time spent on a chair at a desk. You don't pay people for, oh, you have to sit eight, nine, 10 hours on this chair at this desk.
That's what I pay you for. You pay them for results. And that's what leaders have to understand. You pay for results, not for the time spent. Now we have to get to, of course, how do we implement this in your organization? Implementation simply means, first, number one rule, everything you do is led by science, not by opinions. And when you now say, look, I'm reading the person, I just don't enjoy reading these studies.
They are hundreds of pages long, wrong, thousands, and I read them. So you really, I know that I am the weird one here, Paul Lee, when I like to get home after a long day of work and I love to read through a scientific PDF, I just like to do that. However, I know and I can understand that many people don't enjoy that. When you want to, for example, know what does work and not work, what is a good practice, bad practise or malpractice in remote work? Professor Sigal Neely, Harvard University, published on that matter in lots of papers. Either you go through her studies, Google Scholar offers you the full access here. If you don't want to go through the studies, just read the book Remote Work Revolution, where in very, very normal words, understandable for absolutely anyone, she describes brilliantly and founded in science based in science, what does work, what does not work.
And by the way, when you still say we only have an onsite culture, again, I wish you great recruiting budgets because anyone knows you will need them. So when you have the scientific backing, you of course have to do an evaluation. And the evaluation is what fits our organisational culture? What is it that the team wants? What is it that the people want? I can give you a very simple example. One public office, an IT department, by the way, in Lower Saxony, that's in Germany.
That's rural Germany, almost rural, or at least it's not that there are not too many big cities there. And they, in our said, they offer 90% work from home, while other places such as Berlin, for example, offer basically on-site work only. And suddenly you have people from Bavaria applying for jobs in Lower Saxony. And why do they do that? I interviewed people there scientifically and they said, Look, I know that two days per month, I have to get up at 3 a. m. in the morning and I have to get in my car at 4 a. m. and I have a five-hour drive there.
And then I'm there at 8 a. m. in the morning. And that is my choice. And I do it two days per month. And in the evening, I probably have to to drive back. Some people simply take a hotel for a day and then go back next day.
So they have the two days one after another. So it's done for a month and you have to do that 12 times a year.
Tick the box, all cool. But then they say it is such an advantage not to go to an office every single day. And when some people say, hey, I just like to work with people in the office, then maybe another organisation is for you and that one is not. Always evaluate what really is the organisational culture. What is it that the people want? However, when you as a leader simply say, I don't want that. In my opinion, it doesn't work.
I had bad experiences with it. This one person cheated on me. So anyone who cheated on the working times now probably has to suffer from it. One person did wrong, anyone gets punished. When you do that, people will simply say, Look, I'm travelling more. I spend more time in public transport. And the time and the cost for that is on you because you want that.
It's not that something is needed. It's not that something is necessary. It's not legally obligatory and there is no benefit in it. And the work environment here is actually just standard off nothing special. And you want me to show up so you pay for it for the time, for the cost, for anything I spent here. And that is a massive cost. When you waste the organization's profitability on your personal preference, you are a bad leader.
You're the definition of a bad leader. However, when you say, hey, case by case decision, some people can come in, others don't. Way, way better. Make an evaluation. And as soon as you did the evaluation, then you have decisions and rules what is it that we do? What is it that we do not do? And as soon as the rules are in place, you can keep on working in a hybrid setting and as long as you do it as we just discussed, everything will turn out brilliantly well.
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