Seven Essential Hybrid Work Tips for Leaders in 2025

If you’re the leader of a team that includes remote and in-office workers, 2025 is the year to focus on new management strategies and skills that will foster stronger communication, camaraderie, and culture. This might mean engaging in more intentional discussions about hybrid work policies, shifting employee measurement standards, or giving teams more autonomy over their in-office and remote schedules. It should also mean discussing boundaries and ensuring that your organization’s managers at all levels have the tools they need to lead hybrid teams successfully.

To help you do just that and start the new year off right, MIT SMR gathered some of the best advice from hybrid work experts who have shared their insights with MIT SMR over the past year. Consider this a concise guide to help you build a stronger hybrid team in 2025.

1. Communicate hybrid work policies transparently.  Humans are perfectly capable of making informed choices about the organizations they want to work at. But to be informed, people need clear and unambiguous information about what the terms of the agreement are.
2. Measure success based on outcomes, not activity or inputs.  Employees are most productive and engaged when they’re given the flexibility and trust to manage their schedules and are judged based on the outcomes they’ve committed to. Companies can also leverage the entrepreneurial spirit and youthful energy of Gen Z by reframing goals for the company as challenges that they can help solve. Clarify the end goal, but leave gray space in how goals will be achieved. Then publicly and authentically reward progress toward those goals.
3. Let business units and teams, not CEOs, determine in-person schedules.  The patterns of what interactions work best in person vary across both organizations and functions. Every business function likely has its own key times when being in the same room is more meaningful.
4. Discuss boundaries around communication outside of work hours.  When you have conversations with employees about boundaries, consider your role as both someone who can be interrupted and be the interrupter. Get curious. Ask your team members about their working hours and when, if at all, they consider it appropriate, necessary, or reasonable for you to contact them outside of that period. Likewise, explicitly set expectations for gaining access to your personal time and attention.
5. Make time for personal connection at the start of virtual meetings.  If you get down to business right at the start of a meeting, you obliterate your opportunity to nurture your most important assets: human relationships. The first five minutes of every virtual meeting — whether one-on-ones, team meetings, sales meetings, or client meetings — must be devoted to personal connection. And five minutes is only a guide.
6. Seek support for leaders of hybrid teams.  “Senior leaders in the organization need to find a way to provide some support to their managers. They’re the ones that are burned out. If you’re not providing your managers [with] any kind of training or any kind of guidance in how to lead distributed teams, you end up with people sitting at polar extremes.
7. Understand the realities of return-to-office mandates.