Remote, office or hybrid work – what’s the best model for your organization?

Knowledge-intensive organizations today are dealing with choosing strategies about where work should be done – remote, office or hybrid? Some organizations determine their remote, hybrid, or on-site strategy through experimentation and learning, while others rely on management decisions and stricter policies. Many aim to make informed choices collaboratively. For this purpose, an open and free DIS comparison tool was developed. It allows collecting employee experiences and comparing the current and desired states across several aspects of work.

Author: Heidi Myyryläinen

Workplace strategy

Through the Distance LAB project (Distance LAB 2025), we gathered feedback indicating that knowledge-intensive organizations often select remote, office, or hybrid models without a clear strategy, sometimes mirroring other organizations and relying on strict office attendance policies. Taking cues from others is useful, though the most effective workplace strategies are those that balance organizational goals with the needs of the work and the people involved. Although flexibility is valued, organizations often face tensions when deciding on a workplace strategy. Employees seek flexibility, while often organizations need coordination and they also aim to keep up some organizational culture. Many organizations also want to support development of innovations. There are some experienced trade-offs, such as autonomy versus control, cost savings versus social capital, and short-term efficiency versus long-term capability. There are worries that technology-mediated interaction is unable to fully replace spontaneous human interaction. (Trevor & Holweg 2022) From our project experience, these issues are common; however, there are also highly innovative fully remote organizations that would not alter their approach.

Purvanova & Michell (2025) point out choosing a workplace strategy – office-forward, remote-first, or hybrid – based on clear goals. They stress the importance of understanding why a strategy is chosen, its potential outcomes, and how to implement it in line with employee needs. Equally, Kim & Dirks (2023) suggest that organizations systematically map and measure how different remote, office or hybrid approaches function across different employee roles. They further observe, given the diversity of work responsibilities, that a single model is unlikely to be effective for all employees. They suggest workplace strategy effectiveness should be measured in performance outcomes as well as in employee experiences and engagement.

Many scholars suggest that workplace strategies work best when they are aligned with how employees prefer to work. This means employees’ preferences should be understood. If these preferences can be taken into consideration in an organization, this typically leads to better outcomes. Each work mode calls for different approaches to managing work. Clear communication and a genuine effort to understand what employees need are essential in all of these. (Purvanova & Michell 2025)

A study by Alasoini (2025) shows how organizations choose the right combination of remote and office work. In their study, they end up identifying four broad strategic approaches. First, leadership may increase office presence through direct mandates, requiring employees to come in more often. Second, leaders may encourage more on-site work through dialogue, shared reasoning, and leading by example. Strict rules are avoided. Third, an organization may treat the amount of office work as non-essential, focusing instead on adapting work practices to individual preferences and task requirements. Fourth, a company may let its work culture evolve organically. They allow teams and employees to shape remote–office practices.

Alasoini (2025) followed three Finnish companies with high-trust, autonomous work environments. None strictly followed a single approach to remote or office work. While leaders sometimes encouraged more office presence, teams largely decided their own practices, and softer incentives – like appealing office spaces or shared events – were also used. Overall, the balance between remote and in-office work emerged organically through ongoing interactions among teams, employees, and clients, rather than through a consciously designed remote-work culture.

Gather information about employee experience through DIS comparison tool

An essential part of decisions about remote, on-site, or hybrid work is understanding employees’ experiences, and being able to compare views on these. For this purpose, in the Distance LAB project an open and free tool was developed (Distance LAB 2025). It allows comparing how employees assess the current state of work with their ideal state, both remotely and on-site.

The tool can be useful for organizations that are evaluating or refining their remote and hybrid work practices. It can be used both by individuals interested in reflecting their views or by teams aiming to understand one another. This tool was developed based on the feedback from partnering organizations. They wanted to compare current experiences with their desired state.

The tool has been developed drawing on both various theoretical approaches and feedback from the field. The evaluation has five key areas: organizational belonging, virtual communication, knowledge, and learning, organizational culture, emotions, trust, adaptability, and outcomes and relations with stakeholders.

Employees engage with the tool by rating their experiences in each area across three dimensions: remote work, on-site work, and their ideal or preferred level. The tool can provide input for hybrid strategies, showing what works best remotely, in-person, or where additional support or training is needed. It can also be repeated to track changes over time and see how adjustments affect employees.

Conclusions

Understanding what works for productivity and for people at the same time is harder than it seems. Hybrid work research highlights that strategies effective in one remote-ready environment can lead to unforeseen outcomes in another. (Trevor & Holweg 2022). This raises questions about how alignment between organizational objectives and human needs can be meaningfully understood.

Organizational decisions about remote, office, or hybrid work depend on multiple factors, including strategic goals, the nature of the work, people´s ability to manage their work and their work environment at home, organizational culture, leadership approaches, and collaboration practices. While certain types of work or fields require physical presence, teams that communicate effectively, share knowledge, and are open to experimentation can perform successfully in remote or hybrid settings.

Choosing a suitable work model is a strategic process in which organizations weigh the demands of tasks, the needs and autonomy of employees and their working culture and goals. It is also a learning process. Understanding the unique side of your organization, the goals, culture, leadership and work, is worthy – even a limited set of reflections can reveal patterns, concerns, or needs that might otherwise remain hidden.

The DIS comparison tool is available for free at www.distancelab.eu.

References

Alasoini, T. 2025. Itseohjautuvan hybridityön luottamus- ja kontrollirakenteet tietotyöntekijöillä. Hallinnon Tutkimus. Vol .44(2), 69–83. Cited 1 Dec 2025. Available at https://doi.org/10.37450/ht.143409

Distance LAB. 2025. Distance Soft Interaction Skills tool. Distance LAB. Cited 1 Dec 2025. Available at https://distancelab.eu/distance-soft-interaction-skills-tool/

Kim, J., & Dirks, A. 2023. Is Your Organization’s Remote Work Strategy “Working”? Exploring the Impact of Employees’ Attitudes Toward Flexible Work Arrangements on Inclusion and Turnover Intention. Therapeutic Innovation & Regulatory Science. Vol. 57(6), 1209–1216. Cited 1 Dec 2025. Available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s43441-023-00549-7

Purvanova, R., & Mitchell, A. 2025. How Do Organizations Align Their Workplace Strategy to Employee Work Location Preferences. In: Purvanova, R. & Mitchell, A. The New Workplace. Springer Nature Switzerland. 131–156. Cited 1 Dec 2025. Available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-86046-1_9

Trevor, J. & Holweg, M., 2022. Managing the New Tensions of Hybrid Work. MIT Sloan Management Review. December 13. Cited 1 Dec 2025. Available at https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/managing-the-new-tensions-of-hybrid-work/