Last month I was on a call with an engineering team. Eight people. Five in a conference room, three on video. The five in the room were having a conversation among themselves – body language, side comments, whiteboard sketches. The three on video were watching a slightly out-of-focus camera pointed at the whiteboard, hearing about half of the side conversations, and contributing maybe 10% of the ideas.
After the call, one of the remote engineers messaged me privately: “I’ve no idea what we decided.”
That’s hybrid work in one sentence.
The worst of both worlds
I’ve been fully remote for years. I ran distributed teams at Decloud. I worked with remote engineers at the fintech startup. Remote works because everyone operates under the same constraints. Nobody has hallway access. Nobody has a whiteboard advantage. All context lives in written artifacts because it has to.
Hybrid breaks that symmetry. Some people are in the room. Some aren’t. And the people in the room have massive advantages they don’t even notice.
Decisions happen in hallway conversations after the meeting ends. Context gets shared over lunch. Feedback happens in passing – “hey, nice work on that PR” – which sounds trivial until you realize the remote people never hear it.
The office people aren’t doing this maliciously. It’s just how humans work when they share physical space. Information flows through proximity. Hybrid means some people get that flow and some don’t.
Remote-first is the only fix
If you’re going hybrid, you have to operate as remote-first. Not “remote-friendly.” Not “we’ve good video conferencing.” Remote-first.
That means: if one person in a meeting is remote, everyone joins from their own device. Even the five people sitting in the same conference room. Yes, it feels awkward. Yes, it works. Because now everyone has the same audio quality, the same view, and the same ability to participate.
That means: decisions are documented in writing. Not “we’ll share notes later.” The notes are the decision. If it’s not written down, it didn’t happen. This was already true for remote teams. Hybrid teams need to adopt it explicitly because the temptation to rely on in-person context is strong.
That means: async communication is the default for status updates, progress sharing, and non-urgent questions. Sync time is reserved for things that genuinely benefit from real-time interaction – architecture discussions, debugging sessions, retrospectives.
What the office is actually good for
I’m not anti-office. The office is great for specific things. Onboarding new engineers who need face time to build relationships. Design workshops where you need a whiteboard and rapid iteration. Team retrospectives where emotional nuance matters. Pairing sessions on hard problems.
The office is terrible for status meetings. It’s terrible for solo focus work. It’s terrible for anything that could be a written update but instead becomes a 30-minute calendar block because someone wanted “face time.”
If your team’s office days are filled with meetings that could have been documents, you’re using the office wrong.
The meeting problem
Meetings are where hybrid equity dies. I have a strict rule for the teams I advise:
Every meeting needs a written agenda shared before the meeting starts. If there’s no agenda, there’s no meeting. Every meeting gets notes published within an hour of ending. Action items have names and dates. Follow-up conversations that happen in the hallway get summarized in the notes channel.
This is annoying. It’s also the minimum viable process for making hybrid fair. Without it, the remote engineers are always operating on incomplete information and always a step behind.
Performance management by green dot
Here’s the thing that makes me angry about how some organizations do hybrid: they evaluate performance by presence. Who is in the office. Who responds fastest on Slack. Who is “always available.”
That’s not measuring performance. That’s measuring proximity. And it systematically disadvantages remote engineers, parents with caregiving responsibilities, anyone in a different time zone, and anyone who does their best work in focused blocks without interruption.
Measure outcomes. Code shipped. Problems solved. Systems improved. Incidents handled. If the work is good, I don’t care where the person was sitting when they did it.
Why this is harder than full remote
Full remote forces discipline. You have to write things down because there’s no alternative. You have to make meetings inclusive because everyone is remote. You have to trust people to manage their time because you can’t see them.
Hybrid lets you be lazy. The in-office group gets context through osmosis and assumes everyone else has it too. Meetings are “inclusive” because there’s a camera in the conference room. The written documentation is “good enough” because the office people fill in the gaps verbally.
That laziness creates a two-tier system. And it compounds over months. The remote engineers gradually lose context. They get passed over for projects that start with in-person conversations. They burn out from constantly feeling behind.
I’ve seen this happen at three different organizations this year alone.
The simple version
If you’re going hybrid, commit to remote-first practices. Written decisions. Async defaults. Equal meeting participation. Outcome-based evaluation. Intentional office time for things the office is actually good at.
Or just go full remote and skip the hardest coordination problem in engineering management. Honestly? For most teams, that’s the better call.