Hybrid work grows up: leaders double down on in-person perks
The gist
Hybrid work is no longer a COVID-era fix—top leaders are doubling down on in-person perks to spark mentorship, innovation, and real relationships.
What to know
- Leaders like Sanofi’s CEO and Bloomberg execs now call hybrid work a strategic, permanent model, with flexible in-office expectations like 'two, three, four days' to build critical mass.
- Executives say virtual tools just can't deliver the trust, mentorship, and spontaneous collaboration of face-to-face work—AT&T’s CEO even blames weaker innovation on remote setups.
- The return-to-office push is spreading but uneven: big corporates are calling workers back (sometimes to five days), tech firms remain flexible, and places like Victoria, Australia may soon guarantee two remote days by law.
Serendipity Drives Office Value
Executives now design hybrid policies around the creative sparks and mentorship that only unplanned, in-person encounters can deliver.
By June, executives were no longer describing hybrid work as a temporary compromise but as an operating model that deliberately preserves in-person collaboration where it matters most. In Harvard Business Review, Sanofi’s CEO argued that “100% Remote doesn’t give whatever your thing,” especially in “relationship led industries, scientific led industries” where “that serendipity creates a lot in terms of a high performing environment… you can’t take away that chance,” then translated that view into policy: “our expectation is people do two, three, four days, whatever feels right for them,” because “unplanned encounters are not only nurturing, but probably generate ideas and learning from one another.”
By September, that logic had broadened into a clearer hybrid blueprint: keep flexibility, but organize office presence intentionally enough to sustain collaboration, mentorship, and relationship-driven work. On Bloomberg Podcasts, one leader said, “We recognize we got to be flexible… we're never going back to five days a week… but we want people as close as we can around… so we have people all over the country… all over the world… but we wanted critical mass,” while a Canadian workplace trends discussion the same month said hybrid offices still need to function as “home bases” for “one on one mentorship” and places where teams “work through problems together, big projects together.”
Face Time Fuels Innovation
Leaders insist trust, learning, and breakthrough ideas depend on physical presence, with virtual tools falling short for real connection and collaboration.
Leaders are not arguing for office time as ritual; they are arguing that some forms of learning and trust still require physical proximity. On The CMO Podcast, one executive said leadership development was “100% Observation,” recalling that P&G was comfortable “putting different people in the room just so they could watch,” while also insisting that Zoom cannot reproduce the nonverbal cues and mentoring bonds formed in person; that helps explain why, in research on office use, “almost 40% of the people we surveyed said that they just are confused about why they come into the office.”
What organizations are building instead is intentional in-person time aimed at the interactions screens miss: spontaneous exchange, dense collaboration, and relationship formation. On HBR IdeaCast, AT&T CEO John Stankey said the company “was never going to execute on the level of innovation necessary… when we were virtual,” because such work happens better “shoulder to shoulder,” and with a “barbell workforce” of veterans and newer hires, “when folks aren't in juxtaposition with each other” mentoring suffers; Masters of Scale captured the same gap more casually: “nobody puts on the agenda like 8 minutes of kabitzing… but that's exactly what you do with a coffee machine.” The same logic shapes event design: “A good event is not just about getting 200 people in a room… It’s about increasing the odds that meaningful human to human collisions happen.” At scale, that payoff can be measurable: CES attracted “more than 150,000 business attendees,” with “Attendees report an average of 29 meetings,” and “68% make new clients or business contacts – an average of nine new contacts per attendee.”
Hybrid Norms Split by Sector
Corporate giants push for more office days while tech firms and new laws in places like Victoria, Australia, reinforce flexible remote rights—revealing a fractured future of work.
By mid-2026, the recalibration was large enough to register not just in policy memos but in how executives described the market. Bernardet Brennan of Sirant said return patterns were splitting by company type: tech firms remained more fluid, while “the bigger corporate companies are calling for a call back to work,” adding, “I see a lot of them calling for 5 days a week now,” a sign that the shift had spread across major employers even if it was not landing evenly across the economy.
That breadth was also visible beyond individual employers, in both office-market behavior and the policy backdrop shaping workplace norms. Brennan said workers wanted to be “in the thick of it and in their big cities,” pointing to a noticeable pull toward urban office centers, yet the picture was still mixed: Peter Saalfield of Fast Company reported that Australia’s state of Victoria is considering legislation that would give eligible employees the right to work from home two days a week, shifting remote work closer to a legal entitlement in at least some jurisdictions.
