Summary: Recent hybrid policy failures at Amazon and Paramount show what happens when workplace mandates are disconnected from organisational reality. Effective hybrid policies need clarity on organisational priorities, recognition that different teams have different work patterns, frameworks for managers to create agreements democratically, transparent exception criteria, and workplace data to measure performance. Without these foundations, policies create resentment, disengagement and turnover rather than the collaboration they promise.
Headlines over the past couple of years have borne witness to some pretty public failures in hybrid work policy and return-to-office (RTO) mandates.
From 91% employee dissatisfaction ratings after Amazon’s 2024 full-time RTO mandate to Paramount forking out $185 million in post-mandate severance packages, it’s become clear that rolling out these policies is risky business. And when organisations don’t explore their priorities and strategies before policy creation starts, the chance of failure only increases.
So to prevent your hybrid policies from falling flat, here are five important questions workplace leaders should be asking themselves and other stakeholders.
Question 1: What are the organisation’s workplace priorities in the next 12-24 months?
Hybrid policies fail when they’re disconnected from reality and organisational objectives.
So, the first step to creating effective hybrid policies is articulating the why:
- Why working in the office is beneficial
- Why a policy is required
- Why in-office work supports the organisation’s goals (e.g. improving collaboration, reducing churn)
Companies rolling out strict RTO mandates, including Instagram and Paramount more recently, state that employees are more “creative and collaborative” in person.
But the supporting evidence behind this is never shared, leading employees to believe, perhaps rightly so, that leadership values appearances and getting ROI from expensive leases over actual productivity and employee wellbeing.
It’s a violation of the social contract between employer and employee; in other words, what the employer provides and what it asks for.
It’s no wonder that RTO mandates are now proven to have minimal impact on office attendance. Even as the number of days required in the office has increased over the last few years, attendance has barely budged, according to FlexIndex’s research.
Question 2: How many different types of work exist right now, and which of those require different patterns and environments?
Hybrid policies fail when there’s no visibility into teams’ workplace habits and preferences, and no acceptance that these sometimes don’t require in-office work.
Your hybrid policy is less likely to fail if it integrates nuance. This starts with understanding that each team will have different needs and wants when it comes to office working.
The development team doesn’t need to be in the office as frequently as the HR team, for example. Marketing might need to be in three times a week, but it would be wasteful to mandate five days from salespeople when they’re off meeting clients most of the time.
When leadership makes no effort to understand these differences and unfurls a constrictive blanket over everyone in the name of “better collaboration and creativity”, it shows people that the priority is rule compliance, not job performance.
That’s a recipe for simmering resentment that leads to hybrid policy failure and a resignation fiesta of senior and most skilled employees.
Question 3: What guidance and frameworks can we give team leads to democratically map out their hybrid working agreements?
Hybrid policies fail when managers neither agree with them nor think they’re worth enforcing.
53% of HR VPs don’t agree with their company’s RTO mandate, and 40% of managers ignore non-compliance when it happens on their team.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. As a manager responsible for your team’s performance, output and satisfaction, what are you going to do if your top salesperson comes in once per week instead of three times? Raise the issue with HR so they get written up and resign the week after? Absolutely not.
Failing to acknowledge this at a leadership level doesn’t just create resentment at the employee level. It leaves managers feeling frustrated, disengaged and morally conflicted about enforcing a policy they don’t agree with.
According to Gallup’s 2025 State of the Workplace report, manager engagement fell from 30% to 27%, and was a significant contributor to the $438 billion disengagement costs.
Disengagement is likely to follow when managers are asked to enforce hybrid working policies they don’t agree with.
Question 4: What categories should policy exceptions fall under, who should approve them and how will we track them over time?
Hybrid policies fail when policy exceptions aren’t allowed in theory, but are prevalent in practice.
Jumping back to the previous point – if a top performer can only come into the office once a week because they have childcare duties or live 100+ miles away from the office, what manager is going to force them back in?
Stamping out individual exceptions to hybrid work policies isn’t just a turnover risk, but a wellbeing one, too. Over a third of employees reported that fear of being forced back into the office negatively impacts their mental health.
Whether flexibility is needed for family reasons or health reasons, or because commuting into the office is incredibly expensive, it’s in an individual’s best interest to quietly ignore a hybrid policy that negatively impacts wellbeing or family.
But this creates even more problems when an individual who spends three hours a day commuting to comply with the mandate finds out their colleague has a completely different arrangement. One that management knows about. Why are some people more deserving of exceptions than others? Cue an organisational mudslide of mistrust, cynicism and resentment.
Hybrid policies fail when no one has taken the time to articulate and document who meets the criteria for a policy exception and why.
Question 5: What workplace data do we have to create and measure the performance of our policies?
Hybrid policies fail when there’s no way to measure performance, iterate or improve.
You can’t improve what you can’t measure. And with hybrid policies, you also can’t maintain what you can’t measure.
Amazon’s 2025 post-RTO mandate desk shortage fiasco is a prime example.
The data organisations need to create an effective hybrid policy also includes the available supply of workspaces – square footage, meeting rooms and desks.
Other important pieces of the data puzzle include attendance data at the organisational, site, team and neighborhood level, alongside qualitative sources like employee engagement surveys.
Although the data question is the last one here, it can also be the first reason policies fail. Workplace data is how you, as a workplace leader, understand reality and create hybrid policies that align with it.
Key takeaways
Before rolling out or refining your hybrid work policy, ask yourself whether you can answer these strategic questions:
- Can you explain why in-office work supports your specific organisational goals? If you’re asking for more office time, your employees need clear evidence showing how this supports priorities like collaboration or retention. Does your policy demonstrate this connection, or does it prioritise appearances over actual productivity?
- Have you mapped different team needs before applying the same rules everywhere? Your development team doesn’t need the same office patterns as your HR team. When you ignore these differences for the sake of ‘better collaboration’, you signal that compliance matters more than performance.
- Do your managers have frameworks to create hybrid agreements democratically? When you force managers to enforce policies they don’t support, frustration and disengagement follows.
- Have you defined transparent exception criteria and tracking processes? When some receive formal exceptions due to childcare or health reasons whilst others don’t, trust erodes rapidly. Who meets exception criteria in your organisation, and how will you document and track this fairly?
- Do you have the workplace data to create and measure your policy’s performance? You need attendance data at organisational, site, team and neighbourhood levels, alongside qualitative insights from employee engagement surveys. Without this data, how will you know whether your policy aligns with reality or needs adjustment?
Get a framework for using attendance data to distinguish assumptions from reality and a four-step policy-to-practice plan in HubStar’s Hybrid Policy vs Reality Playbook.
