Managing hybrid teams – time to show managers some love

Why managers are still the missing piece in the flexible working conversation

When hybrid working arrived almost overnight during the pandemic, many people suddenly found themselves managing hybrid teams with no time for preparation and little consideration for the ways their role as a manager would have to adapt (let alone how they would manage their own home situation). Most did their best, and many did remarkably well, given the circumstances.

But here’s what’s changed since then… and what hasn’t.

Hybrid working is no longer an emergency measure; for many organisations it has become the norm, embedded in how teams operate day to day. And yet the conversation has shifted in a direction that concerns us. Return-to-office mandates are increasing. Flexibility that was hard won is being quietly eroded. And in many workplaces, there is a growing pressure (sometimes explicit, sometimes unspoken) to be seen in the office as a signal of commitment and ambition.

We think this is worth pushing back on. Not because offices are bad, or because flexibility is always the answer, but because the evidence on what actually drives performance, retention and wellbeing points clearly in one direction. And because the people most affected by reduced flexibility are, more often than not, working parents.

The visibility trap

“One of the most persistent risks in any hybrid or flexible working environment is what we call the visibility trap: the tendency, often unconscious, to favour the people we see most. To assume that presence signals effort, to make progression decisions based on who is in the room, rather than who is delivering results.

This isn’t a new problem. But it becomes more acute when some team members are in the office every day and others are not; whether by choice, by caring responsibility, or by the nature of their role.

For managers, avoiding this trap requires active effort and clear skills. It means assessing performance on outcomes, not hours. It means making sure that people working flexibly are equally visible in conversations about development and opportunity. It means checking assumptions — regularly, honestly — about who is contributing and how.

This doesn’t happen by accident. It requires managers to be equipped, supported and given explicit permission to lead in this way.

Same team, different realities

The pandemic gave us a useful phrase: we are not all in the same boat, we are in the same storm in different boats. It captured something true then, and it remains true now.

The working parent doing three days in the office and leaving at 5pm to do school pick up is navigating something fundamentally different to the colleague with no caring responsibilities who can stay late, travel at short notice, and be visible whenever visibility matters. Both can be high performers. Both deserve to be treated as such.

Managers are the people who have to hold that reality and lead fairly across it. That is genuinely difficult work — and most of them are doing it without nearly enough support.

What organisations are still getting wrong

When hybrid working first expanded, a CIPD report found that while the majority of organisations were introducing or expanding flexible working, fewer than a third had any plans to train their managers on how to lead in that environment. The gap between policy and practice was significant then. In many organisations, it still is.

Because here is the reality: a flexible working policy only delivers what it promises if the manager implementing it has the skills, the mindset and the confidence to do so. A parent who is technically entitled to work flexibly but whose manager rewards visibility, questions commitment, or makes them feel like a problem to be managed — that parent is not being supported. They are being set up to fail quietly.

And when that happens, organisations lose talent. They lose women, disproportionately, at the point when they could be stepping into more senior roles. They lose the trust of the people they invested in recruiting and developing. And they lose the diversity of thought and experience that genuinely flexible teams bring.

Managers need support too

It would be easy to frame this as managers being the problem. They are not. Most managers want to lead their teams well — they want to be fair, they want to retain good people, they want to create environments where everyone can do their best work.

What they often lack is the support to do that well in practice. They are caught between organisational pressure to have people in the office and individual team members who need flexibility to manage their lives. They are being asked to assess performance fairly across people with very different home circumstances, without any framework for how to do that. They are expected to have difficult conversations about boundaries, expectations and workload — often without having had those conversations modelled for them.

This is why we work with managers alongside the working parents in their teams. Because the most powerful shift we see in organisations isn’t just when a parent gets clearer on what they need — it’s when the manager supporting them gets clearer on how to lead. That combination is where real, lasting change happens.

The case for holding the line on flexibility

With the current pressure to return to the office, it is more important than ever for organisations to be intentional about what they are actually trying to achieve — and honest about what they might lose.

Flexibility, done well, is not about working less or being less committed. It is about working in a way that is sustainable over the long term. It is about retaining people through the transitions — parenthood, caring responsibilities, life — that would otherwise push them out. It is about building teams where performance is measured by what people contribute, not where they sit when they contribute it.

The organisations we work with who do this well share a few things in common: they are clear about outcomes, not hours; they train and support their managers rather than leaving them to figure it out alone; and they treat flexibility as a genuine cultural commitment, not a benefit to be withdrawn when things get busy.

That is what good looks like. And it is absolutely achievable — with the right support in place.

To see how we can support the managers in your organisation take a look at our programmes for managers, including managers of hybrid teams.