Why HR must redesign collaboration for the hybrid workplace

The rise of hybrid and virtual work since the pandemic has put immense pressure on leaders and employees across sectors. Leaders are contending with new issues and tensions that undermine the quality of connectivity and collaboration in the workplace. Balancing the benefits of hybrid working with the necessity for employees to connect in person is a major challenge in fostering a trusting and psychologically safe environment. 

In my opinion hybrid working has exposed a serious design flaw. Today’s organisations are not designed for collaboration within a digital age. In fact, many organisations were never designed to collaborate well in the first place. 

Our global research with over 500 senior leaders emphasises this point. Although 97% view collaboration as essential to organisational performance, siloed ways of working still dominate. Even more concerning, 40% of managers admit to tackling complex problems alone rather than drawing on the collective intelligence within their organisations. These figures should concern HR and executive teams. 

I would argue that when it comes to collaboration senior leaders and HR teams have placed too much emphasis on leadership capability – including how managers show up, listen better, build trust and role-model inclusive behaviours. This has come at the expense of addressing the key organisation design issues that are far more complex yet essential for effective collaboration.

Collaboration failures in a hybrid environment are not primarily behavioural. They are structural. Rather than placing responsibility on leaders’ behaviour alone, executives need HR’s support to become architects of how work is designed, how coordination happens, how decisions are made, how visibility is distributed and how connection is supported. This is becoming extremely important as today’s business environment is characterised by an accelerated pace and constant disruption. 

Jean Jereissati, former head of one of Brazil’s largest drinks companies, describes modern business as in a state of continuous crisis. Many leaders would recognise this. The implication is profound: technical expertise and heroic leadership are no longer enough. Organisations are increasingly dealing with ‘wicked’ problems, which are messy, multidimensional challenges with no obvious solution. These require disciplined coordination, strong relationships, psychological safety and the capacity to collaborate across boundaries.  However, in my view many organisations are trying to solve 21st-century problems with 20th-century work designs.

Six structural tensions shaping hybrid collaboration

In our research and client work leaders often describe tensions that sound interpersonal on the surface. For example: friction in meetings, decision paralysis, disengagement and siloed work. But when explored more deeply these tensions are symptoms of how work is currently structured. Below are six systemic tensions shaping collaboration. Each reveals a design flaw rather than a leadership failure.

1. Multidisciplinary coordination versus over-collaboration

   In complex environments collaboration is essential. But it is not always valuable. Morten Hansen, a faculty member at Apple University and an experienced researcher in collaboration, warned over a decade ago that collaboration can be counterproductive when indiscriminate. Coordination consumes time, attention and political capital. He noted: “Some tasks and some projects simply don’t require people to work together.” 

   However, many organisations default to collaboration. Hybrid work has exposed many weaknesses with this approach. People are placed into project teams without clarity about purpose, decision rights, authority and roles. Leaders are assumed to have endless capacity to coordinate across multiple forums, time zones and agendas. They do not.

   This creates a systemic tension – the need for multidisciplinary solutions alongside the risk of over-collaboration. When organisations fail to specify where collaboration adds enterprise value and where it does not, they avoid necessary conversations about priorities, resourcing and trade-offs.

2. Flexibility versus blurred boundaries
   
   One of the clearest benefits of hybrid working has been improved work-life balance for many employees. Reduced commuting has freed up time for family, wellbeing and reflection. One of our clients described a profound shift: “When I used to commute all the time my life was dominated by work… I don’t really feel like that now.” Yet the same system that enables flexibility also blurs boundaries. 

   At the 2023 World Economic Forum's Growth Summit leaders discussed the blurred boundaries between work and home life brought about by remote work. Psychologists warned of work encroaching on personal lives, and managers highlighted challenges in creating safe working environments, such as cramped spaces or calls with children present.  This tension is structural. In many organisations flexibility has been granted without redesigning workload, expectations or norms within a digital environment. 

   It is tempting to frame this as a resilience issue. In my experience that framing lets organisations off the hook. What is actually missing are constraints deliberately designed into the system. Hybrid work demands explicit decisions about when work happens, how availability is signalled and where responsibility lies for protecting energy, not simply encouragement to ‘switch off’ or the placement of employees in resilience and/or wellbeing programmes.

3. Inclusivity versus reduced visibility

   Virtual work has removed physical barriers to participation. Meetings are no longer limited by room size or geography. Junior employees, working parents and those with disabilities have greater access.

   Yet visibility has become uneven. Many participants described feeling less seen, less heard and more hesitant to speak up in large virtual forums. “Where there used to be 12 people in the room, now there are 40… it’s inclusive, but it makes you worry more about what you say.”

   Research within Microsoft found that remote working reduced cross-group collaboration by 25%, creating more insular teams and fewer new connections. Groups became internally cohesive but externally disconnected. This creates a structural tension: greater formal inclusion alongside reduced informal visibility. Without deliberate mechanisms to surface quieter voices, distribute airtime and build bridges across groups, hybrid work amplifies inequality in influence. Inclusivity cannot be left to good intent. It must be designed.

4.  Connectivity versus loneliness

   Human beings are wired for connection, yet we are witnessing a decline in workplace connectivity worldwide. Connie Hadley from the Institute for Life at Work in Boston suggests that over 70% of workers reported that they had difficulty making connections with their work teammates. A study by People Management found that more than half of employeesacross age groups and sectors feel lonely most of the time. 

   Many of our clients share with us an ongoing hesitation to ask for help, reduced creativity, and diminished confidence. In our report on the dark side and sunny side of virtual working we interviewed a young man who joined a company for the first time in his career. Initially he was excited to connect with colleagues online. After a while he became disillusioned and disconnected. He was missing human connection, advice and a bit of chit-chat.

   This is not surprising. Digital systems optimise for task completion rather than relational depth. Informal contact and shared context once provided by physical proximity no longer happen by default. When organisations design work around meetings and outputs in a digital world human connection becomes optional. Over time this erodes trust, wellbeing and learning.

5. Culture and innovation versus efficiency

   Hybrid work has undoubtedly driven efficiency. However, Jonathan Trevor and Matthias Holweg from Oxford Saïd Business School found that while flexibility and technology-enabled collaboration can improve short-term coordination they may also weaken organisational culture and innovation over time. 

   Innovation depends on high-quality conversation between unfamiliar colleagues across silos and boundaries.  Culture depends on shared meaning, psychological safety and good relationships across organisational hierarchy. When work is designed to optimise for immediate delivery via mainly virtual tools, longer-term social and intellectual capital is depleted. Loyalty weakens. Organisational identity becomes thinner. Innovation suffers quietly before it fails visibly. What often looks like a people problem is, on closer inspection, a predictable outcome of how work has been organised.

6. Winners and losers by design

   The sharpest tension exposed by hybrid work is that it creates structural winners and losers. Working parents, particularly mothers, often benefit from flexibility and are more able to sustain senior careers. Junior employees and new joiners, however, lose access to informal learning, observation and sponsorship: ‘You learn a lot just by being around… you don’t get that now.’

   The office is increasingly framed as a collaboration space, but its role as a developmental space is diminishing. Without redesigning onboarding, learning and progression, hybrid work risks embedding inequality into the system rather than removing it.

What HR must do differently to improve hybrid collaboration

If collaboration breakdowns are structural then HR’s role must shift from shaping behaviours to designing conditions. Below are core interventions HR can lead.

1. Redesign collaboration – including when not to collaborate

Before embarking on collaboration, require teams to decide upfront:

• What is at stake?
• Is collaboration genuinely necessary with a clear purpose?
• What value will coordination create or destroy?

Do we have a budget and a protocol to resolve conflicts?

2. Build coordination capacity into work design

Open honest conversations on leadership bandwidth. Reduce overlapping meetings. Clarify lines of authority and decision rights. Design escalation and conflict-resolution mechanisms, especially within a virtual world, which makes it easier to avoid difficult conversations.

3. Institutionalise boundaries for hybrid work

Flexibility needs guardrails. Establish norms around availability (out-of-office), meeting-free time and recovery. Boundary protection should be a system responsibility, not an individual coping strategy.

4. Design for visibility and psychological safety

Introduce smaller forums, structured turn-taking to bring in quieter voices, explicit inclusion of remote voices and accountability. Inclusivity must be engineered into interactions at team and organisational levels

5. Reclaim the office as a social and learning system

Balance virtual working with face-to-face (in-person) sessions. Be explicit about when it is suitable to connect online and on which occasions people must come together physically for learning, onboarding, relationship-building and strategic dialogue.

6. Experiment with work design and learn from evidence

We are still in transition. Encourage safe experimentation. Treat work design as adaptive, not fixed. HR leaders should support leaders in learning quickly from data and lived experience and making the necessary changes. 

Hybrid work has not failed. It has revealed the limits of organisational systems designed for a different era. The real challenge now is not improving leadership behaviours, but redesigning work so that collaboration is intentional rather than automatic, inclusive rather than exhausting, and value-creating rather than value-diluting. HR cannot limit its influence to shaping behaviours alone. It must act as a designer of the system itself, even when that means questioning long-held assumptions about productivity and ‘how work gets done’.