Technology

Hybrid Working Vs. Return-To-Office – The Jury Is Still Out

AnyFans 2025-09-30

By AuthorVoice,Web Golinkin

When I visit New York City, which I do quite regularly, I usually stay at a hotel near JPMorgan Chase’s massive new headquarters on Park Avenue. On my early morning runs over the past few years, I watched with some amazement as the old Union Carbide building was replaced by a 60-story tower that was designed to accommodate up to 14,000 employees. Some of these employees have already moved in, with a grand opening scheduled for later this fall.

As the magnitude of the building became apparent (it literally “towers” over all others in the area and is one of the city’s largest), I had two thoughts: the grandiosity of it made it seem like a monument to JPMorgan Chase’s CEO, Jamie Dimon; and it appeared that he would almost be compelled to justify the company’s $3 billion investment in the 2.5 million square foot edifice by filling it up with headquarters employees, most of whom had been working on a hybrid basis.

Sure enough, Mr. Dimon announced earlier this year that headquarters employees were required to return to the office five days a week. And he is not alone in implementing this requirement. Other large company CEOs have recently announced similar policies, including Amazon’s Michael Jassy, Dell’s Michael Dell, AT&T’s John Stankey, and Walmart’s Doug McMillon.

The question is whether these employers will be proven correct in forcing their employees back to the office. The answer is not at all clear (nor in some cases are their policies, as some on close inspection appear to allow for less than full, five-day-a-week office attendance), as there are pros and cons to returning to pre-pandemic norms.

Disadvantages of Hybrid Working

There are meaningful disadvantages to hybrid working (defined as a combination of in-office and remote working), all of which have been pointed out by the above CEOs as justification for their RTO policies.

Challenges with Collaboration and Communication: Hybrid settings can create barriers to spontaneous interactions, hinder collaboration, and lead to miscommunications.

Weaker Organizational Culture and Social Cohesion: Employees may feel less connected to organizational culture or experience loneliness and social isolation if not managed properly.

Technological Dependence and Resource Gaps: Effective hybrid work relies on robust digital infrastructure and tools, which can create inequalities if not all employees have access to them.

Potential for Inequality: Not all roles are equally suited to hybrid work, potentially creating two classes of employees – those with remote flexibility and those required in-person. [This is particularly an issue in healthcare, where most of those who provide patient care must do it in person, though virtual care is growing and roughly 50% of healthcare organization employees are not directly involved in patient care.]

Work-Life Boundary Erosion: Some employees struggle with separating work from personal time, leading to increased stress or longer working hours.

Advantages of Hybrid Working

On the other hand, hybrid working has significant advantages, some of which have been borne out by research. CEOs of large companies that continue to permit hybrid working include Google’s Sundar Pichai, Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Citigroup’s Jane Fraser, and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky.

Flexibility: Employees gain more autonomy over their schedules, allowing better alignment with personal commitments, which often leads to improved job satisfaction and mental health.

Retention and Productivity: Large studies (e.g., Stanford) show hybrid work boosts retention and maintains or even improves productivity levels compared to fully in-office models.

Work-Life Balance and Well-being: Workers often report reduced commuting time, expense, and stress, greater capacity for exercise and healthy habits, and increased overall well-being (which could reduce employee healthcare costs over time).

Broader Talent Pool: Organizations can recruit beyond their immediate geography, increasing diversity and gaining access to a wider range of skills.

Environmental and Cost Benefits: Companies may see reduced office-related costs, and with fewer commutes, hybrid working models may lower carbon footprints.

Stanford’s Research Findings

Stanford’s research on hybrid working has been extensive, involving large-scale randomized trials, multi-year studies, and data collection from diverse industries, focusing primarily on knowledge workers.

The studies have included thousands of employees from major companies and used both company records and employee surveys to measure effects on productivity, retention, well-being, and career advancement.

The initial studies tracked workers in many functional areas, including finance and technology, and covered both U.S. and international firms.

Research designs included randomized control trials where some teams shifted to hybrid work while others remained fully in-office, enabling direct comparison.

Stanford’s team monitored objective metrics, including outputs (e.g., code written), time worked during home vs. office days, performance evaluations, promotion rates, and resignations, as well as subjective data, including work and life satisfaction, perceived productivity, and mental health.

The initial studies ran for 12–18 months and incorporated data before, during, and after hybrid transitions, ensuring robust statistical findings.

The general conclusion of this early research was that hybrid working had no negative impact on productivity or career progress, while dramatically improving employee retention (1/3 reduction in attrition).

As mentioned above, Stanford’s research is ongoing, and they are hosting a “Remote Working Conference” in late October 2025 to share the most recent findings.

The Power of Flexibility

While Stanford’s research has been rigorous, we are still in the early stages of evaluating the relative effectiveness of hybrid working. That said, it is clear that hybrid working has some meaningful advantages over pre-pandemic, in-office norms.

One important advantage of hybrid arrangements is that they give working parents more flexibility to care for children in their homes, particularly when the cost of childcare is unaffordable and/or unavailable.

To put this matter in perspective, women currently represent nearly half (47%) of the U.S. workforce, and one-third (33%) of them have children under age 18 in their homes. In 2024, this equated to more than 24 million working mothers with children under 18. Looking at it another way, about 70% of all women with children under 18 are in the workforce.

This is not to suggest that the burden of childcare should always fall on female parents, but the reality is that it frequently does. I saw with my own eyes when running a large healthcare organization during the pandemic that giving women with children in their homes remote working flexibility (if their job descriptions allowed for it) benefited them greatly without impairing their productivity.

This is also not to suggest that hybrid working is a solution to the childcare crisis in our country, as it most definitely is not. The challenges of balancing work and childcare obligations in hybrid working environments are not insignificant, and the average cost of third-party childcare (~$11,000/child/year) is unaffordable for many, even when it is available (which it is not for more than half of the U.S. population who live in “childcare deserts”).

However, hybrid working helps parents address childcare challenges, and it is not surprising (as Stanford’s early research showed) that it would increase retention for the employers who support it.

Opposition to Office Attendance Tracking

In addition to the positive impact of giving employees more flexibility in where they work, there has been growing employee opposition to the office attendance tracking methods used by some of the employers that have called for return to office working.

One of the most well publicized examples of this is at AT&T, where company executives have acknowledged that their technology-enabled “presence reporting” system is “driving people to the brink of frustration” due partially to its inaccuracy and the lack of trust in employees that its existence implies.

As recently reported by Business Insider, when a recent employee survey asked whether AT&T’s “policies and systems support me in delivering my best work,” roughly half of the respondents said no, and many voiced concerns about the RTO mandate and presence reports in their freeform responses.

Embracing or Resisting Change

It is always easier to return to the old ways of doing things than to figure out how to do them better, because choosing the latter course usually requires a period of trial and error that can be challenging, and success is not guaranteed. Hybrid working is no exception in this regard.

However, we live in a world that is constantly changing at an accelerating pace, and organizations must decide whether they are going to embrace change in the spirit of continuous improvement or resist it.

In an era in which recruiting, retaining, and motivating the most talented and committed team members from a shrinking and highly competitive labor pool is central to success, and in which it is difficult to make the case that requiring office attendance five days a week has been working all that well for employees or employers, reverting to old norms may not be the solution for many organizations.

Some forward-looking organizations that particularly value and trust their employees will seize this opportunity to refine hybrid working from its current state into a solution that will give them a sustainable competitive advantage, while others may be left behind in their resistance to change.

While the jury is still out, the fact that hybrid working has become so well established in such a short time suggests that it is far more than just a temporary, COVID-related blip on the human resources radar screen. My guess is that hybrid and traditional working models will co-exist in the future, but that says a lot about the appeal of the new models and the limitations of the old one.

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