A CIL-sponsored Academy of Management award recognizes Peter Cappelli and Ranya Nehmeh for showing why hybrid work depends less on where employees work than on how leaders coordinate the relationships, learning, and collaboration that make work possible.
Getting to the Source of the Problem
Few workplace debates generate as much conviction as hybrid work. Arguments often divide into opposing positions: Remote work protects flexibility and autonomy, or office attendance is essential to performance and culture.
The title of Peter Cappelli and Ranya Nehmeh’s Harvard Business Review article, “Hybrid Still Isn’t Working”, entered directly into that debate. Cappelli noted that the authors did not choose the provocative title; they believed they were reporting what the evidence showed. The reaction nevertheless revealed how quickly research questioning hybrid practices could be perceived as threatening employees’ ability to work remotely.
Their argument is more nuanced. It is not that every employee must return to the office five days a week or that every hybrid arrangement must fail. It is that organizations cannot change where people work without reconsidering how work is managed. Individual flexibility can become organizationally costly when employees rarely overlap, relationships weaken, and management practices remain designed for fully colocated teams.
Drawing on interviews with 720 employees across 38 offices in three countries, along with recent workplace research, Cappelli and Nehmeh examined how hybrid arrangements can affect onboarding, collaboration, informal learning, culture, and advancement. Their article received the Academy of Management Organizational Behavior Division’s 2026 Outstanding Practitioner-Oriented Publication in Organizational Behavior Award. Sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School’s Center for Innovative Leadership, the award recognizes work that contributes meaningfully to management practice.
What Leaders May Not See
“I think many leaders frankly know little about what is happening in their workplaces,” Cappelli observed.
A hybrid policy may appear coherent on paper while the experience of work tells a different story. Attendance expectations may not be enforced. Hoteling can prevent employees from sitting near the same colleagues twice. When teams choose office days independently, employees may commute only to spend the day on virtual calls because the people they need are elsewhere.
These patterns matter because management depends on more than assignments and scheduled meetings. Much of organizational work moves through persuasion, negotiation, reciprocal assistance, and relationships. New employees learn whom to ask for help. Colleagues exchange information across teams. People build trust that makes later cooperation easier. When those connections weaken, additional technology and meetings do not automatically replace them.
From Individual Flexibility to Intentional Coordination
“If leaders could make one change, I would say it is to move from individual flexibility to intentional coordination,” Nehmeh said.
When employees independently decide when to come in, the activities that benefit most from proximity can disappear. Collaboration, learning, relationship-building, and informal exchange require the relevant people to be present at the same time. The question is not simply how many office days to require, but which work benefits from people being together and how organizations can coordinate those moments.
Nehmeh does not recommend imposing an identical policy everywhere. The principle can remain consistent while its application reflects the team, the work, the country, and individual accessibility needs. Teams might prioritize shared time for onboarding, complex collaboration, professional development, or important conversations while preserving flexibility where physical presence adds little.
Clear purpose is critical. Employees are more likely to accept office attendance when they understand its value. Frustration grows when attendance appears arbitrary or when visibility in the office begins to count more than the quality of the work.
Rebuilding Relationships by Design
Their book, In Praise of the Office: The Limits to Hybrid and Remote Work, develops the relational dimension of the argument more fully.
“The office is not just a place to get work done,” Nehmeh explained. “It is where many of the relationships that make work possible are built.”
Informal interactions help employees find mentors, learn about opportunities, understand organizational norms, and develop trust outside their immediate teams. These experiences once occurred with little planning because employees repeatedly encountered one another. When that proximity disappears, leaders must recreate its useful functions intentionally.
Cappelli emphasized that relationships can still be rebuilt when employees are in the office only occasionally, but the process requires planning. Organizations can reduce virtual meetings during shared office time, connect groups that depend on one another, and create opportunities for genuine interaction. The objective is not maximum attendance. It is meaningful connection.
Connecting Research and Practice
Cappelli brought an academic and management-research perspective to the project, while Nehmeh contributed an international practitioner’s understanding of how workplace policies affect people and organizations. Their combined perspectives shaped both the article and the subsequent book.
For Cappelli, the award demonstrates that practitioner discussions do not have to remain trapped between declarations that remote work is either an unquestioned success or an organizational disaster. For Nehmeh, it affirms the value of connecting strong research with practical relevance.
CIL’s sponsorship reflects the Center’s commitment to translating leadership and organizational research into insights leaders can use.
Questions for Leaders
Before revising a hybrid policy, leaders should examine the system of work surrounding it. Do the people who need to collaborate share meaningful time together? Does coming into the office change how employees learn, connect, or solve problems, or merely change where they join virtual meetings? Are mentoring, cooperation, and relationship-building intentionally supported? Do employees understand why their presence is valuable?
Hybrid work will not improve through scheduling alone. Flexibility can remain important, but it must be coordinated around collective needs. Relationships, learning, trust, and visibility do not sustain themselves when interaction declines. Leaders must create the conditions that allow them to develop.
The future of hybrid work is not simply a choice between home and the office. It is whether organizations will manage the social system of work as intentionally as they manage tasks and performance.
About the Authors
Peter Cappelli is the George W. Taylor Professor of Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and director of its Center for Human Resources. Ranya Nehmeh is a senior HR strategist, author, and adjunct professor whose work focuses on people strategy, HR policy, leadership development, and talent management. Together, they are the authors of In Praise of the Office: The Limits to Hybrid and Remote Work.
Read the full article here: Cappelli, P., & Nehmeh, R. (2025). Hybrid still isn’t working. Harvard Business Review, 103(4), 118–125.
