April 29, 2025
Q&A: Hybrid policies can divide workplaces
More than half of U.S. companies with hybrid work policies now require employees to be in the office three days a week.Pixabay
The COVID-19 pandemic forced an unprecedented shift to remote work. Now, as organizations transition back to in-person operations, hybrid work has emerged as a popular solution.
Hybrid work claims to offer the best of both worlds — employees benefit from face-to-face collaboration in the office and can also focus on deep, individual work at home — but new research from the University of Washington shows this arrangement might be too good to be true.
More than half of U.S. companies with hybrid work policies now require employees to be in the office three days a week. The study, published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, shows that moderate office attendance requirements create ideal conditions for the formation of workplace subgroups.
When employees follow a three-day office schedule but choose different days to come in, certain team members naturally work together more often. Researchers found that, over time, these patterns create “co-location imbalance,” which divides teams into subgroups with stronger internal relationships.
Michael Johnson, co-author of the study and professor of management in the UW Foster School of Business, spoke with UW News about hybrid archetypes and their impact on the workplace.
Can you explain how hybrid work leads to the formation of subgroups?
Subgroup formation has been examined quite a bit when considering demographic fault lines in teams. For example, if you had a team of five people that had three older white males and two younger Latina females, then those demographic characteristics could align and create a fault line in the team, where you have clear subgroups on both sides. The research on subgroups finds it’s usually bad for teams because people tend to collaborate and cooperate more with people in their subgroup. They will often not do so with people across the fault line.
My co-authors and I started considering ways hybrid work could impact this subgroup formation. That’s when we started thinking about people’s individual choices of which days they would go to the office. Could the imbalance in who you co-locate with across days impact subgroup formation?
There is a lot of social psychological research that says when we’re face-to-face with people, we tend to form better relationships with them than if we’re remote. Our logic was, if you’re co-locating with some people a lot and others not very much, the people you’re co-locating with could begin to form subgroups because they’re sharing contact and all the informal things that are happening together. The people who are remote are not sharing those things. Even if they’re connecting via technology, they miss out on so much by being remote on those days. That was kind of how we started to connect the dots between hybrid work and subgroup formation.
The study discusses how different hybrid archetypes have different effects. Can you explain some of those archetypes and how they differ?
The clearest subgroup archetype that we put in the paper is “divide to conquer,” where on a fictional five-person team, three members are co-locating a lot together. The other two are co-locating a lot together but not with the other three very much. Another archetype that was particularly interesting was “us vs. them,” where three people are at the office every day and the other two work fully remote. This is what you see with virtual teams or partially distributed teams, where you might have some people in different geographic locations who can never attend in-person. In the “power dyad,” you have two people who are co-locating a lot together while the other team members aren’t co-locating with each other very much. Here, one strong subgroup is making most of the decisions about the work and then maybe delegating to the periphery, where everybody is alone.
The only archetype that we identify in the paper that seems positive is called “all for one and one for all,” where everybody is co-locating on the same days. If workers are in the office two days a week, they decide they’re going to be on Tuesdays and Thursdays and remote all the other days.
Many organizations that are adopting hybrid work are choosing three-day in, two-day out policies. With this policy, our analysis shows there are more than 200,000 possible co-location patterns from a team of five that can occur in any given week. While that policy may have benefits in other ways, it’s also dangerous in terms of teams fracturing into unproductive subgroups.
What happens in the workplace when these subgroups form?
GitLab found that office workers form tight-knit groups that exclude remote employees without even realizing it. Office workers grab coffee together, chat in hallways and hold impromptu meetings. Remote employees miss all of this. These “two-tier work environments” happen naturally when some people share physical space and others don’t. And the problem compounds over time. In-office teams develop their own communication patterns that remote colleagues never see. Progress made in these casual conversations becomes invisible to remote workers, widening the divide.
The people who are in the same subgroup form a virtuous cycle with more collaboration and more of a sense of identity with their subgroup. But there is also a vicious cycle of less collaboration and less of a sense of identity with the other subgroups, or those who are not in their subgroup. Over time, as these subgroups continue to co-locate together, they can develop a much more rigid pattern of who they want to work with and who they’ll collaborate with most effectively. They can even become very suspicious of the other subgroup, thinking that the other subgroup might be trying to undermine or sabotage their work.
But subgroup formation is not always bad. In time crunches, when workers must produce a product very quickly, there isn’t time for everybody to co-locate and talk all together. Instead, they need to split the workload: one team takes these two things, another team takes those two things. It’s possible that organizations could encourage an imbalance in co-location when they have time sensitive kinds of issues.
What can organizations learn from this research when considering their hybrid work policies?
Hybrid work provides real benefits in terms of employee satisfaction and retention. But organizations that require two or three days in office without scheduling coordination create ideal conditions for fracturing teams into unproductive subgroups. Our study suggests successful hybrid models must go beyond simple attendance policies. Organizations need intentional strategies that consider co-location patterns, not just total office days. Companies that ignore these dynamics risk creating permanently divided teams where information, opportunities and relationships develop unequally between in-office and remote colleagues. For hybrid work to succeed, leaders must recognize that workspace isn’t just physical — it’s social.
Other co-authors are Lisa Handke of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Patrícia Costa of ISCTE Business School, María Ximena Hincapié of Universidad de los Andes.
For more information, contact Michael Johnson at mdj3@uw.edu.
Tag(s): Foster School of Business • Michael Johnson