Hip hip, hybrid! Here we are again, caught up in the seasonal hype about “hybrid” working. Some companies now proudly market themselves as WFH-only, while others spark ritual outrage by demanding “everybody back to the office.” Most, however, insist—often with studied conviction—that some middle way must surely lead us to workplace paradise. But what is actually going on?

This morning, I joined an engaging session with the ever-insightful Lynda Gratton to talk about the promises of hybrid working—or rather, as Lynda emphasised, the challenges of redesigning work itself. Despite all the enthusiasm, the reality is that we still don’t really know whether, or how, hybrid working actually works—the available data remains far from clear. What is certain, as Lynda explains, is that managing hybrid work is exceptionally difficult. It requires more advanced management skills, higher levels of trust, and truly intentional work design. Just as clear is the need to rethink our offices: too often, we have constructed work environments by simply replicating traditional factory designs, without a real understanding of the potential—and the constraints—of time, place, and community.

All of this is true. Which brings me to the curious concept of “hybrid.” The term, of course, originates from the experimental breeding of new species—mules, for example, being the classic hybrid of donkey and horse. More recently, “hybrid” has become a metaphor in technology, used to describe innovations that blend characteristics, like hybrid cars that combine traditional and electric power. Now, the language of hybridity has become the fashion in work. But the notion is not without problems.

Firstly, much of the appeal of hybrid working seems rooted in our faith in the supremacy of science. The very notion of “hybridity” evokes experimentation, Darwinian mutation, and evolutionary fitness. In other words, hybrid work is often assumed to be better simply because it is perceived as the product of natural evolution under existential pressure—its very emergence is taken as proof of its superiority. People routinely point to the pandemic as a global “laboratory” of labour, supposedly demonstrating the successful cross-breeding of office and home working. And yes, with just a little imagination, we can picture consultants and academics during Covid, rushing around factories and office buildings in white lab coats, solemn-faced, stopwatches in hand, busily evaluating every curious mutation of work. Undoubtedly, there has been an avalanche of statistics—productivity, commuting times, work-life balance, employee engagement, office rents, real estate costs—often cited in support of hybrid working’s supposed superiority. Yet, for all the undeniably interesting insights, as Lynda cautions, the results from all this experimenting remain far from conclusive. Despite our faith in trial and error, we have yet to discover the definitive recipe for how best to configure our work.

But there is a second, and arguably more fundamental, issue. When the pandemic began, our discussions about the future of work were not driven by a desire to merely increase productivity or to optimise individual convenience. Instead, the focus was on restoring a sense of meaning to our working lives. We talked about redesigning organisations not just to make work easier, but to make life itself better. And crucially, the deeper question of what makes work meaningful—and what constitutes a good life—cannot be answered by statistics alone.

Against this backdrop, another reality becomes significant, as Lynda notes: a large number of people never returned to the workforce. In Japan, some factories are still empty. In the UK, many older workers—those aged 55 and over—simply did not come back. Research highlights three main reasons: some became ill, some are now caring for others, but many simply realised they did not enjoy their work and saw no reason to return. The recent debates about conscious and quiet quitting echo this last point: work is not just a paycheck. If all we take from the pandemic is a debate over whether adding some homeworking allows us to keep work fundamentally the same—just a little cheaper and more resilient—we will have missed the point entirely.

This is why the whole idea of “hybrid work” risks sending us in the wrong direction. The challenge isn’t about cross-breeding new variants of work from existing templates, but about intentionally redesigning work in every company so it can reach its full potential. By definition, there can never be a single universal template—because we, and our organisations, are all fundamentally unique.

For example, many young people and new joiners may actually prefer to be in the office; few will enjoy sitting by themselves in a tiny flat, spending the day moving from one Zoom call to another. Middle managers, on the other hand, often have larger homes, family responsibilities, and decades of relational capital to draw on—making home working especially appealing for them. Senior executives are usually keen to be in the office building, if only to see what’s happening on the ground.

Alas, beyond individual preferences, which might evolve quickly throughout time (homeworking might initially be cool, but quickly turn out to be very lonely), there is also the question of what “objectively” makes work good. How can we best develop ourselves and others? How do we individually and collectively learn and grow? We must never cease to intentionally revisit the question of how work can help to attain the highest potential of everyone involved.

This, in a nutshell, is the real challenge of business transformation. Good leaders must constantly and intentionally reconnect with the true essence of work, balancing the drive for productivity with the needs of individuals, the well-being of the community, and the demands of the collective good. Work itself must be redesigned wisely and flexibly—navigating the tensions between autonomy and control, fragmentation and integration, craft and purpose. One size simply cannot fit all, neither within a single company nor across different organisations.

That’s why it’s misguided to condemn Company A for asking people to return to the office, or to celebrate Company B for making remote work permanent. Whatever the so-called “objective” observers in lab coats may claim, we are not plants or animals to be cross-bred for higher output, and there are no scientific recipes for answering normative questions about good work. There is no guarantee that anyone’s work is better simply because we’re doing the same old job, only three days a week from home.

As Lynda concluded, and I wholeheartedly agree, intentionally designing good work is hard. Our challenge is to find new ways to make work not just a means of earning a living, but also an end in itself—a foundation for a good life. The pandemic may have mostly passed, but the quest for good work remains as urgent and important as ever.