Hybrid Working and Team Effectiveness: Challenges and HR Best Practices

Hybrid working is no longer an experiment. In many organisations, it has become business as usual, to the point where the question “Does hybrid work?” is increasingly being replaced by another: how can organisations ensure it genuinely supports teams, collaboration and business performance?

Because hybrid working does not manage itself. Its consequences become visible in the everyday rhythm of work: weaker information flows, distributed teams, declining engagement, or situations where high levels of activity fail to translate into real effectiveness. The key challenge is therefore not deciding how many days employees should spend in the office, but how to manage the working model deliberately and effectively.

In a hybrid environment, it is easy to confuse speed with effectiveness. One person completes tasks more quickly, another gains more time for focused work. However, if the number of meetings increases at the same time, decisions take longer and teams start “moving faster, but not in the same direction”, organisations begin to lose ground where effectiveness is truly determined: collaboration.

Hybrid Working and the Real Challenges Organisations Face

The challenges of hybrid working rarely appear in isolation. It often starts subtly: fewer people take part in initiatives, information circulates more slowly, meetings multiply and decisions become harder to make. Each of these signals may seem like a separate issue, but together they reveal something bigger: the organisation is losing its shared rhythm.

As part of the annual Hybrid and Beyond study, we analyse how remote and hybrid working affect 18 different areas of organisational performance, including communication, information flow, and individual and team effectiveness. Conducted in Poland, the research shows that workplace challenges tend to cluster together and reinforce one another. We describe them as three “hybrid diseases”: Organisational Apathiosis, Malignant Dispersal, and Performance Typhoid.

The Key Risks for Teams

Organisational Apathiosis rarely looks like a sudden crisis. More often, it develops gradually: fewer employees contribute ideas, participation in initiatives declines, and team energy shifts from “building something together” to “doing my job and logging off”. Formal collaboration continues, but the sense of community, purpose and shared responsibility weakens.

Malignant Dispersal reinforces organisational silos. In a hybrid environment, teams can begin to operate like separate islands: information moves more slowly, spontaneous knowledge-sharing becomes less frequent, and learning from colleagues is no longer a natural part of daily work.

Performance Typhoid is perhaps the most deceptive of all because it can look like success. Calendars are full, communication is constant and tasks are completed more quickly. The problem is that individual productivity is not always the same as team effectiveness. Sometimes people work more efficiently on their own while the organisation as a whole loses clarity of direction.

Why These Problems Persist

For many companies, hybrid working began as a temporary solution. It became permanent, yet not all organisations developed the long-term principles, processes and tools needed to support it. Ad hoc solutions may have worked during the transition period, but they are often insufficient for a mature hybrid working model.

This is why office-return policies alone do not solve the problem. If an organisation cannot clearly explain why people should come together, who needs to be present and which activities are most valuable to do face-to-face, attendance becomes a goal in itself. In a hybrid model, what matters is not the number of days spent in the office but the purpose and quality of those days.

Left unmanaged, a hybrid model rarely works well. It requires decisions around availability, communication, meeting rhythms, the role of the office, leadership capabilities and how to measure results. Without these foundations, hybrid working becomes a collection of individual preferences rather than a shared way of operating.

From Presence to Collaboration Quality: What Successful Organisations Do Differently

Organisations that manage hybrid working effectively are not looking for a single “magic solution”. Instead, they build resilience through a combination of interconnected practices, ranging from clear availability guidelines and collaboration frameworks to leadership support and workplace design.

The data shows that this resilience is not merely declared; it results from everyday actions. Comparing organisations that show no signs of hybrid diseases syndromes with those that do reveals clear differences in the adoption of collaboration, leadership and workplace support practices.

These differences show that stronger hybrid working performance is supported by specific HR best practices in hybrid work. In practice, this means organisations should:

• set clear rules for availability and presence, so teams know who is in the office, when and for what purpose,
• support leaders in managing distributed teams, rather than assuming they will develop new collaboration practices on their own,
• design office days around collaboration, workshops, onboarding, knowledge-sharing and relationship-building,
• adapt the workplace to how teams actually operate, so it supports meetings, focus work and collective work.

The Role of HR and Its Impact on Results

For HR, this is a particularly complex topic, because expectations towards the working model often converge in one place: employees want flexibility, leaders want predictability, and the board wants evidence that the model supports business results. If hybrid working affects culture, engagement, retention, communication, onboarding and team effectiveness, then HR practices become part of the organisation’s performance management system.

A similar pattern emerges in Top Employers Institute data, which suggests that people-focused workplace practices are far more than a nice-to-have. They play a tangible role in how organisations perform. TEI’s analysis shows that companies helping employees manage stress and recharge during the working day are more likely to see improvements in key performance indicators. The same trend can be seen in organisations that provide dedicated spaces for relaxation and downtime. These workplaces tend to report higher levels of employee engagement, highlighting the link between employee wellbeing and organisational performance.

For HR teams, this is an important argument in conversations with the business: wellbeing, employee listening, onboarding and leadership development are not isolated initiatives. They are practices that can support engagement, retention and performance. This moves the discussion about HR away from intuition and towards measurable organisational impact.

That is why the hybrid model should not only be co-created, but also measured on a regular basis: through engagement, retention, the flow of information and knowledge, onboarding effectiveness, collaboration quality, and both individual and team effectiveness. In a mature organisation, hybrid working is not simply a set of attendance rules. It is a deliberately designed way of working that requires data, dialogue with leaders and regular course correction.

If hybrid working in your organisation is still mainly reduced to arrangements around “who comes to the office and when”, it is worth looking at it more broadly: as a collaboration model that requires diagnosis, principles, leadership support and regular measurement of outcomes. We explore which practices help companies strengthen collaboration, engagement and team effectiveness in a hybrid model in the publication “Best practices in hybrid working”, based on the findings of Hybrid and Beyond 2025 — the only recurring study of hybrid working on the Polish market.

Hybrid Working Requires Deliberate Leadership

Hybrid working is not a solution that “falls into place” on its own. Organisations that want to reduce risks and improve effectiveness need to approach it deliberately and systematically — with clear principles, leadership support, well-designed collaboration and measurement of results.

Because hybrid working is not only played out between home and the office. It is played out between chaos and structure, activity and real effectiveness, presence and the purpose of being together. It is one of the areas that determines how teams collaborate, engage and deliver results.