Can we make 'Hybrid work' efficient? Yes!

Introduction

I keep hearing that hybrid work is “the best of both worlds.” Maybe, if you’re a laptop.

For human beings, the year‑round game of office‑home‑office has quietly rewritten the rules of motivation, yet most organisations are still following the 1990s playbook. The result is predictable.

Leaders feel their teams are drifting, employees feel unseen, HR keeps tweaking policies while performance inches sideways.

Problem – Why the Old Models Are Breaking

Classic motivation theory was built for a single, stable environment. Hybrid work gives us two. On any given week, a software engineer may code from a kitchen table that rewards deep focus and pyjama comfort, then present in a glass‑box conference room that rewards visibility and quick banter. Those environments reinforce different behaviours—yet we still judge people with one yardstick.

Proximity bias is the first casualty. The colleague who lingers at the office door gets a nod from the boss whereas the remote teammate who solved the critical bug overnight is a just a Slack notification no one opens at 9 a.m. Reinforcement follows attention, and attention follows proximity. Remote workers end up on an intermittent‑reward schedule whereas office regulars get a buffet. Behavioural science tells us exactly what happens next - the variable‑reward crowd disengages, the always‑rewarded crowd overperforms on theatre and underperforms on impact.

Then comes something called collaboration theatre. We drag people across town for meetings that could have been a link. The commute, childcare shuffle, and lost flexibility become a response cost, yet the meeting’s reinforcement value—another deck reviewed, another status ticked—stays flat. The price went up, the payoff did not. Any half‑decent behavioural economist could chart the motivation drop.

My Experiences – Small Shifts, Big Pay‑off

During a recent engagement with a global engineering firm, we asked managers to start every virtual stand‑up with two minutes of unstructured personal check‑in. Attendance didn’t just go up, defect turnaround time dropped by 18 per cent inside a month.

Why? We re‑introduced the micro‑reinforcements normally delivered in hallway banter.

With a fintech client, we moved praise out of private chats and into a shared “async appreciation” channel. Remote analysts who rarely spoke up in Zoom began posting suggestions proactively, their idea pipeline grew by a third. All we did was make 'recognition' visible to the group, levelling the reinforcement field between home and HQ.

And for a consumer‑goods company fixated on “culture days,” we replaced blanket office mandates with behavioural bridges. If in‑person attendance was required, managers should attach an exclusive reinforcement, hands‑on prototypes, live customer panels, or decision rights that only exist in the room. Once the response cost was justified, resistance vanished.

Conclusion

Hybrid work isn’t a motivation problem, it’s a design problem. We’re flying a new aircraft with the old cockpit diagrams taped to the glass.

To lead in 2025, we must do three things:-

1. Write explicit reinforcement schedules that travel with the employee, not the furniture.

2. Build behavioural bridges—unique rewards for in‑person time, rich social cues for virtual time.

3. Train managers to see proximity bias and collaboration theatre for what they are: leaks in the motivation engine.

The companies that win won’t be the ones with the flashiest hybrid policy, they’ll be the ones that understand the behavioural economics driving everyday choices.