(a revisit from 2020)
Back in 2020, we (like most teams) were working things out as we went.
We wrote a piece at the time on what seemed to be helping – a set of habits that made remote work feel a bit more manageable. It was shaped in a moment where everything felt new, slightly uncertain, and more than a little improvised.
Coming back to it now, a few years on, it’s interesting what’s changed, and what hasn’t.
Hybrid work is no longer a temporary setup. It’s just how many teams now operate. The tools are better. People are more used to it. But the core challenges are still familiar:
- How do we use our time together well?
- How do we avoid meetings drifting or dragging?
- How do we stay connected when we’re not in the same place?
Re-reading what we wrote back then, most of it still holds up. But it also felt like too much.
So, we’ve simplified it – down to the handful of things we still consistently see making a difference.
1. Be deliberate about how you meet
One of the biggest shifts since 2020 is that teams have had time to notice what isn’t working.
Back then, most people just defaulted to replicating in-person meetings online. Now, the teams that seem to find their rhythm have usually had a more explicit conversation about how they want to meet.
Not in a heavy or overly structured way, just enough to remove ambiguity.
2. Facilitation makes more difference than most expect
You can feel the difference quite quickly between a meeting that’s being actively held and one that isn’t.
With someone holding that role, even lightly, things shift. There’s more pace, balance, and a greater chance that the conversation lands somewhere useful. It’s also proven to be a nice way to share some responsibility around the team, with many teams rotating who’s facilitating.
3. Not everything needs a meeting
When teams feel stretched, it’s often less about volume and more about how meetings are being used.
A pattern we keep noticing is meetings becoming the default for everything, whether its updates, thinking time, decisions – all in the same space. Over time, that creates a kind of drag.
What we’ve seen working well is a clearer, shared understanding of the difference between:
- things people just need visibility of
- things that benefit from some back-and-forth
- the smaller number of topics that actually need a decision
With that understanding in place, we’ve seen meetings start to shift. Updates move out of the meeting, conversations become more focused, and time together feels more useful. It doesn’t reduce meetings entirely, but it does improve the quality of the ones that remain.
4. Keep the work visible
When priorities are visible, teams feel more aligned.
It sounds simple, but it’s one of the biggest differences we’ve observed between teams that feel coordinated and those that don’t. When work lives in people’s heads, or scattered across tools, it becomes harder to stay connected to what’s actually happening.
The teams that make this work tend to have a shared view of:
- what matters most right now
- who’s leading what
- how things are progressing
It’s less about having the “perfect” system and more about the discipline of coming back to, and updating what you have. When priorities are revisited regularly and adjusted in the open, it reduces ambiguity and helps everyone stay aligned, especially when people are working across different locations.
5. Use smaller groups to keep things moving
Momentum often slows in large discussions.
You can usually feel it when it happens – conversations start to circle, more perspectives are added, but it doesn’t necessarily move things forward. Everyone’s involved, but progress is slower than it needs to be.
The key here is recognising it happening in the moment and having an agreed way to call a ‘time out’ to pause the discussion. From there, you’re ready to shift gears.
Rather than trying to resolve everything in the full group, when teams break work into smaller pieces and ask a few people to take it forward, with a clear lead, progress is re-energised.
Over time, it builds a rhythm of moving between whole-team alignment and small-group progress.
6. Make space for reflection — and for people
When teams aren’t co-located, connection needs to be more intentional.
In shared spaces, a lot of this happens naturally – quick chats, reading the room, picking up on how someone’s tracking. In hybrid settings, those signals are easier to miss.
Teams we see that navigate this well don’t add a lot more, they just make a bit more space for it within what already exists. A few minutes to check in, a pause to ask how things are going, or a conscious moment to reflect on what’s working (and what isn’t).
The best of those conversations we’ve observed tend to be simple, but they create a different feel over time. People stay more connected to each other, not just to the work, and small adjustments happen before issues build up.
Looking back
There isn’t a perfect model for hybrid work.
But the teams that make it work tend to be more deliberate about how they meet, decide, and stay connected.
Originally written in 2020 by Phil Hartwick. Refreshed by Shaun Sheldrake to reflect what we still see working today.