From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.

HR Brew

Erin Grau

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These proven practices can help HR pros foster a hybrid culture—no free food required.

Ask a Resourceful Human: How to create culture at a hybrid company?

Sam Blum

‘You have to trust your employees. If someone is not doing their job, you’re going to know pretty quickly,’ says one WFH veteran.

A WFH veteran shares how HR can navigate hybrid headaches

Proximity bias can happen at any organization, but these tools can help remote employees break through the ‘Zoom ceiling.’

How can HR address proximity bias in an increasingly hybrid workplace?

Hybrid work

Mikaela Cohen

The return-to-office (RTO) conversation is a lot like Russian nesting dolls: seemingly never-ending. Now, it appears the number of RTO holdouts is, like the dolls, getting smaller and smaller.

 32.2% compared to March 2019, a slight improvement from 35.9% in March 2024 and 37.9% in March 2023, according to 

. But last month, office visits reached new heights nationwide, and even more so in a few cities.

In July, visits to US offices were down 21.8% compared to July 2019. Office visits in New York City exceeded 2019 levels by 1.3%, while those in Miami were down 0.1% from its pre-pandemic norm, recent Placer.ai 

. Office traffic in Atlanta and Dallas were down just 14.8% and 18.3%, respectively.

“There’s certainly some seasonality at play here,” said R.J. Hottovy, head of analytical research at Placer.ai.

The change from March to July could be related to a tendency to go into the office more often in the warmer months, Hottovy told HR Brew. But there may be some larger trends at play unrelated to the weather.

 The cities that have seen office traffic improve, Hottovy said, have also seen RTO mandates. Many New York City 

 like tech and finance have pushed for an RTO, he said, as have some in cities like Atlanta and Dallas.

“Whether it’s tech, whether it’s consumer…office mandates have started to pick up. That’s probably what’s driving Atlanta and Dallas,” he said. “Those are two cities that have seen an increase in population in the last couple years too.”

While office visits have rebounded in Miami and New York City, they’ve lagged in Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. Office traffic in Denver is down 40%, while that in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago is down 34.6%, 34.2%, and 34.1%, respectively.

“It’s interesting looking at all the different markets. It really feels like there’s different dynamics in each city driving return to office,” Hottovy said.

He does, however, suspect that some cities may see the same rebounds currently in Miami and New York City.

“I don’t think we’re going to get there nationwide,” he said. “But it’s possible some of these other markets that have seen big population increases could get back or above what we were pre-pandemic.”

Split photo illustration of an in office worker and at home worker.

Office attendance returns to pre-pandemic levels in some cities

Just when you thought the RTO debate was over…

Mayday, mayday! The return-to-office debate shows no sign of slowing any time soon, as some companies stick to 

But, the companies with hybrid work arrangements might be poised for a smoother landing. Software development company MongoDB’s 5,600-person workforce has followed a hybrid work setup across its 30 global offices in the US, Europe, and Asia since 2021, its chief people officer Harsha Jalihal told HR Brew.

“We had made peace with the fact that the five-day [in-person] workweek was over, and we wanted to find a happy medium, and that’s how our hybrid working model came to be,” Jalihal said, adding what makes MongoDB’s approach work is giving teams the choice to pick between multiple hybrid options.

Jalihal started as the chief people officer in August 2020 when the pandemic was in full swing, and even though more employees went into the office prior to the pandemic, she said flexibility has always been a company priority due to the nature of working with global teams.

“The chances of you being co-located with everybody you work with are low,” she said. “All my direct reports are not based in New York, so I do need to be able to work with people that I don’t share an office with, whether or not Covid happened.”

As companies slowly welcomed employees back into the office in late 2020, Jalihal said she wanted to craft a plan that gave flexibility while offering the benefits that being in the office provides. Where she landed was giving senior leaders the ability to choose between four options.

“When you give employees optionality to opt into something, it drives greater engagement and buy in,” she said. “When you force people to do something, it actually creates more discontent, so we were also trying to balance those two things.”

Since 2021, Jalihal said senior leaders have the option to choose between four categories that define their team’s working style:

In-office model: Three or more days in the office

Flexible working model: One to two days in the office

Customer-facing remote model: Work from home, but go into customer offices

Fully remote working model: Work from home 100% of the time

“We had business leaders decide what kind of working model made the most sense for them,” Jalihal said. “A majority of them went with the flexible working model, or remote if [their employees were] nowhere near a MongoDB office, but we did have a small group of teams that opted into an in-office model.”

There was some initial “change management” that senior leaders needed to work through, Jalihal said, so her team provided guidelines on how to choose a workflow based on team makeup and business needs. Many sales leaders chose the in-office models based on their need for collaboration. Teams with interns and early-career employees also chose to follow a flexible or in-office model for more leadership visibility and mentorship.

Jalihal said she set the expectation that senior leaders themselves had to follow the plan they chose, because it would be “futile” and “disingenuous,” she said, to force employees to be in the office if their senior leader wasn’t there too.

The hybrid expectation is also established in the recruiting process, she added. Her recruitment team asks hiring managers which workflow is preferred for the role they’re hiring for, so applicants know the expectation early on, and there are no surprises.

Unlike companies that have vague RTO policies, Jalihal said her hybrid approach has worked because it’s clear, and her executive team also believes flexibility is key to helping employees do their best work. Jalihal added that she follows this approach in both her personal and professional life.

“I have a family that I have to think about as well, and for me, personally, as a leader, [flexibility] has been a bit of a non-negotiable for the latter part of my career,” she said. “I remember telling [our CEO] that if I’m traveling [to the office] three days a week, you’re going to get a very ineffective CPO, and I’m going to be a very ineffective mother and wife as well, so net-net, no one wins here.”

Giving employees a choice when to be in the office 

“When you give employees optionality to opt into something, it drives greater engagement and buy in. When you force people to do something, it actually creates more discontent,” MongoDB’s chief people officer Harsha Jalihal tells HR Brew.

Hybrid work arrangements are often touted as the best of both worlds, but even they can present some 

That’s why financial services company Prudential Financial is trying to give its hybrid employees even more flexibility. The majority of the company’s roughly 13,000 US-based corporate employees work in one of its 145 offices two to three days a week. But in January 2024, the Newark, New Jersey-headquartered firm soft launched its Work from Anywhere (WFA) program, allowing these employees to work from any location for four weeks a year.

“We are a company and a culture of respect and inclusion, and this flexibility, specifically in ensuring that our employees were feeling supported as they were coming back to work, was really important to us,” Nya Patel, the company’s VP of culture and inclusion, told HR Brew.

In anticipation of its consistent hybrid work policy at the start of 2024, Patel said Prudential wanted to give its employees something in return, and landed on flexibility.

“We started this program as a pilot last year, as we thought about giving that flexibility to our employees,” Patel said.

When employees want to take advantage of the program, they discuss it with their managers in their one-on-one meetings. Patel said she hopes to eventually adopt a formal request process, like that which the company uses for PTO and volunteer days.

Some employees have tacked a WFA week onto their PTO to maximize flexibility. Patel said she’s done this herself: After traveling to Costa Rica last year to vacation and volunteer at an animal rescue, she used a WFA week to visit family in Texas on her way home to New Jersey.

Kate McKeon, a director of culture and inclusion at Prudential, utilized WFA in January alongside two of her colleagues, Sam O’Mara, a talent management manager, and Rosauri Rodriguez, an inclusive recruitment manager. The three, who are based on the East Coast, convened in San Diego, California for two weeks of coworking, during which they joined meetings by the beach and bonded over after-work walks with O’Mara’s dogs.

“Being in a different setting and place allowed us to have more of those conversations of being creative and thinking about things differently that sometimes in your day-to-day [and] in meetings, and out getting things done, that you don’t necessarily have that time for,” McKeon told HR Brew. McKeon, like Patel, said she plans to take another WFA week around the same time as some PTO for a family beach trip.

 One year in, Patel said she’s excited about the program’s progress and potential.

“It was this test and learn, and we actually didn’t know how this was going to go, and having heard all of these exciting stories from our employees and creative ways in which people are using it now, this is the year where we really have to think about, how do we think a little bit bigger?” Patel said. “How do we get creative about it? How do we add a little bit more structure around it that helps support our employees even further?”

Patel’s advice for other HR pros starting a similar program: “It all comes down to your core values as a company,” she said. “If you believe that your employees need the flexibility to do their best work, which we do, I think that then everything is driven from that.”

Prudential sign and building at its headquarters in New Jersey.

Why Prudential Financial lets its employees work from anywhere for four weeks each year

Prudential’s VP of culture and inclusion, Nya Patel tells HR Brew that the company’s Work from Anywhere program gives employees more flexibility.

As HR pros await the verdict in the case of flexible v. in-person work, many are 

 it’ll involve dropping the one-size-fits-all approach.

Business leaders often cite wanting to improve employee collaboration, connectivity, innovation, mentorship, and skill development as reasons to RTO, but a recent 

 from consulting firm McKinsey suggests these goals can be achieved no matter where employees work.

“We can’t just bring people back to the office, and changing nothing else, assume that all of a sudden we get collaboration, or all of a sudden we get connectivity,” Bryan Hancock, a partner at McKinsey, told HR Brew. “It does require practical actions of leaders and of managers to make that happen.”

 Despite many CEOs, like JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and Amazon’s Andy Jassy, pushing in-office work for collaboration, only 49% of mostly in-person employees reported feeling collaborative, compared to 51% and 55% for mostly remote and hybrid employees, respectively.

Collaboration, Hancock said, comes down to the environment in which employees work, not the number of days they’re in an office. Employers interested in improving collaboration in the office should ensure there are enough desks, dedicated meeting rooms, and flexible spaces, as well as quiet areas for solo work, he recommended.

 disengagement have taken a toll on workplace relationships, with some employees 

 seeking them out, but McKinsey’s data shows most employees still feel some level of connectivity. Some 72% of hybrid employees reported feeling connected to colleagues, while 66% of mostly in-person and 65% mostly remote employees feel the same.

If employees feel disconnected from their peers, Hancock said HR can help by prompting managers to facilitate connection through one-on-one meetings and collaboration opportunities.

 in-person work doesn’t automatically lead to innovation. Only 47% of mostly in-person workers reported feeling innovative, trailing behind 51% and 54% of mostly remote and hybrid employees, McKinsey found.

As with connectedness, Hancock said managers can help improve innovation by “setting the direction, making the ideas come together, and then making sure that team members have the time and space to execute on the new innovative idea.”

Learning and development opportunities can be a 

 recruitment and retention strategy. And they happen to need the most improvement across each work model. Only 52% of hybrid workers reported having L&D access, a percentage that drops to 45% and 43% for mostly in-person and remote employees.

“What we’re seeing across modes is individual employees saying that they would like to see more investment in learning opportunities,” Hancock said. He recommended HR create intentional mentorship opportunities between “novice and expert” employees, and an “apprenticeship culture,” by encouraging employees to learn on the job through coworkers and training programs.

 No matter how a company chooses to work, Hancock said, each of these areas will continue to need improvement.

“We see organizations that we’re working with that are being quite thoughtful on this, thinking through both: What are the underlying management practices that we want to change? And then how do we make sure that our physical environment is making that happen? And if we need to change the physical environment, let’s invest in changing it,” he said.

RTO mandates are not leading to more collaboration, connectivity, or innovation

“We can’t just bring people back to the office, and changing nothing else, assume that all of a sudden we get collaboration, or all of a sudden we get connectivity,” a McKinsey partner tells HR Brew.

Return-to-office mandates continue to feel like high-level math equations that even the business world’s brightest can’t solve.

 are among the most recent companies to require a full-time RTOs. But some of these mandates have faced obstacles, including a lack of office space and dissatisfied employees.

Amazon, for example, said in September, it wanted its 350,000-person workforce in the office by early January. As of February, many of their offices didn’t have 

 to accommodate the return, leaving many employees continuing working from home. AT&T had a similar 

. In response to JPMorgan’s RTO mandate, employees expressed their outrage on an internal 

. The company then disabled comments. Some 

 workers have also signed petitions protesting their employers’ requirements.

What’s missing from some of these RTO plans is the recognition of a cultural change, said Jennifer Moss, workplace strategist and author of 

Why Are We Here?: Creating a Work Culture Everyone Wants

. The post-pandemic workplace should combine lessons from the pre-pandemic and pandemic-era models, she said.

“When we’re trying to get people back into the office, we still are executing the office in the same way that it used to be,” Moss told HR Brew. “We just can’t jam the toothpaste back in the tube.”

Improved collaboration, culture, and productivity are often cited as reasons for an RTO, Moss said, but being in the office won’t necessarily help employees achieve these goals.

“People are going into the office, unfortunately, it feels very much like what it feels like to be at home,” she said. “You’re still on Zoom, and you’re still spending your day doing the exact same things you could be doing at home. It feels very arbitrary.”

To facilitate this new era of work, employers should embrace a model Moss called “the third office.” Instead of “pushing” for employees to go back to pre-pandemic norms, she said, employers should consider how they can incorporate the benefits of remote work, like autonomy and flexibility. To that end, a hybrid approach, she said, typically works best.

Moss also urged mindfulness around how the physical office space can affect employees. If a company doesn’t have enough desks, for example, she said HR leaders should rethink how employees work in the office, and create quiet or collaborative spaces outside of the open floor plan.

“The [third office] is a place where you have challenging discussions, where you learn to network, develop soft skills, be able to have team building, build up that social energy and that cohesion,” she said, adding that these activities were undervalued pre-pandemic and lost during the pandemic, and should be part of this new era.

Eventually, however, companies that require five days in the office should offer employees their own dedicated workspace, Moss said. It may seem simple, but being able to personalize a desk is something that, she said, may help employees feel more connected to their workplace.

Identify and communicate the play-by-play. 

Some executives want RTO to alleviate their own “trust issues,” without considering how it might affect employees, according to John Frehse, the global head of labor strategy at consulting firm Ankura.

“You only trust me when I’m in the office. You don’t trust me when I’m at home. What kind of a worker and employer relationship are we dealing with?” Frehse told HR Brew.

Sujay Saha, an employee experience strategist and founder of consulting firm Cortico-X, emphasized the need for a plan. “Don’t make the decision and then try to figure it out, how do I make that decision happen for people…that is the biggest problem in a lot of this,” Saha said. He suggested HR start by identifying employees’ “personas,” like whether they’re working parents or belong to the sandwich generation. This can give HR a sense of employees’ needs and schedules, which can help inform what kind of RTO might make sense.

“There are pros and cons in all of this, so the most important thing that we can tackle is how we do it,” Saha said. “Maybe there is a pace at which you could do it…Reduce the pace and give people that mental adjustment time that is needed genuinely, to take care of their lives before you change [their lives].”

Frehse also advised against focusing an RTO announcement on the enforcement and repercussions of not following the mandate. Instead, communicate the steps and value-add for professional growth.

“It’s both culturally and intellectually lazy to announce a certain number of days of return to office each week, without listing in heavy detail the reasons why—not just benefits for the business, but the benefits for the employee,” he said.

Saha agreed. “Don’t do it, just for the heck of doing it…Be clear about why you’re doing it.”

An office cubicle desk split with an at home desk setup.

RTO roadblocks continue plaguing companies. Workplace experts share what they can do better.

Lacking space and employee resistance continue to halt many return-to-office plans.

Adam DeRose

It all started with a facilities meeting in February 2023. Executive leaders and the facilities team at organic foods producer Organic Valley were meeting to address facility constraint and workspace needs as the southwestern-Wisconsin-based cooperative moved toward calling employees back to the office.

Some people in the meeting—including Kimberly Turnmire, VP of organizational development—began to wonder: What problem are we actually here to solve for?

“Nobody wants to be told to come back to the office three days a week arbitrarily,” she said, adding that the group began to tease out the possibility of pausing the facilities conversation and instead design a company-wide, in-office work recommendation that would better fit Organic Valley.

“Pre-Covid [19 pandemic], most everybody came to the office most days of the week. If there was an arrangement that deviated from that, it was between, typically, the manager and the employee, and HR had no knowledge of it,” she said. “That was all kind of exacerbated when we came back, because initially, when we came back to the office, we had no consistent approach.”

A cross-functional group of leaders from HR, learning, employee communications, IT, and facilities was tasked with “creating clarity and consistency in our approach and our messaging across the entire company.”

The group identified core guide posts to a hybrid RTO policy: “We have to be able to operate a profitable business. We have to be able to remain a competitive employer. We have to be able to hear our employees in this process, and then we wanted to make sure that we thought about our cooperative culture,” she said.

By that November, Turnmire and her team had a plan to be implemented the following June.

Out of scope for this project were the cooperative’s desk-free and “outside” employees, such as field sales reps. The model was specific to what she described as Organic Valley’s desk-based employees, who could be:

Low hybrid: Employees who work in the office three to five days a week.

High hybrid: Employees who make an appearance in the office four to eight days a month.

Remote: Employees who generally live more than 100 miles away from the office and work in a role that is high-hybrid eligible.

“We really felt strongly that whatever we did, ensuring that it’ll give employees as much as possible choice was really important,” she said.

The approach included a decision tree with questions like: Manage people? Onsite asset required? Is servicing others at the organization part of your work?

“We had this path that we could very clearly follow to figure out how eligible [you were] for different types of work,” she said. “We also set some criteria on this based on leadership level…employees at an individual contributor level are much more likely to have more heads-down, non-collaborative work than leaders. And so we drew a line…if you are in a role that is at a director level or above…remote is not an option for you.”

 After Organic Valley deployed the policy in June, the team gathered feedback from employees and made some changes to its facilities to better group low-hybrid employees. The cooperative also deployed scheduling software for high-hybrid and remote employees to reserve space when they’re working in the office.

Recruitment has been an “early win,” according to Turnmire. HQ’d in a small rural town of 750 residents, drawing top talent has been an ongoing challenge.

“We have numerous examples of roles that we want to recruit for where our typical candidate pool might be 20 to 30 people, and by changing the job posting to reference hybrid eligibility, we’re seeing hundreds…literally seeing the candidates increase tenfold,” Turnmire said.

Turnmire said Organic Valley will use employee surveying in 2025 to measure impacts on the culture and engagement. Early surveying revealed “a rise in engagement survey scores—most notably in overall engagement, recommending this as a great place to work, and confidence in leadership,” according to 

The team also expects turnover to decrease, especially among employees with fewer than three years of tenure.

 The move hasn’t come without challenges.

“Ensuring team members have a detailed work plan with clear job expectations is critical to maintaining accountability and driving results,” Frank suggested.

Turnmire told HR Brew the coop is still working on developing its more recalcitrant leaders when it comes to flexibility and remote work. The team is working out leadership development for best managing a hybrid team and IDing early adopters to help peer mentor those who might be struggling with the adjustment.

“In an ideal world, we would have done that before we implemented [a hybrid work policy], but there was such a strong desire to go ahead and give people this flexibility,” she said.

Office desk and milk cartons sitting on conveyor belt.

Both structure and choice define Organic Valley’s hybrid work policy

“We really felt strongly that whatever we did, ensuring that it’ll give employees as much as possible choice was really important.”

Not to be the bearer of bad news, but the return-to-office debate may never end…especially as hybrid workers are more likely to experience burnout than their remote and in-person counterparts.

Full-time employees on a hybrid schedule experience an average of 1.1 burnout symptoms, which may include “low energy or exhaustion, negative feelings about your job, anxiety about going to work, disappointment with your job performance or with your career prospects,” according to 

. In-person employees average one symptom, while remote workers average 0.7.

Burnout among all employees has reached an all-time high, according to Glassdoor 

 published in August. “After companies have shifted gears towards laying off workers or cutting costs, you’re seeing more employees talk about burnout in the sense that they’re getting pressure from leaders to do more with less,” Daniel Zhao, lead economist at Glassdoor, 

Why are hybrid workers experiencing more burnout symptoms than their in-person and remote peers? For starters, it’s easier for burnout to go undetected if it bleeds across different work settings, as opposed to being confined to a cubicle or an at-home setup, workplace experts shared 

 Remote and in-person employees may have clearer boundaries, whereas hybrid workers may face more ambiguity as to what’s expected of them, Dominik Katz, ways of working lead for software company Miro, 

 in Fast Company. Because they have in-person and remote arrangements, hybrid employees may experience heightened pressure to go into the office when it’s not required, and to attend virtual meetings that are optional. He said this may result in burnout.

HR pros can help employees identify and combat their specific burnout symptoms, the Washington Post 

Help employees reach a “20% threshold,” Leah Phifer, an employee engagement consultant and founder of consulting firm WhyWork, 

 told HR Brew, which means at least 20% of time at work is spent on tasks or activities that “light them up” or “give them energy.”

“HR professionals can help their folks, A, define what those activities are for them, and then, B, do a bit of job crafting to ensure individuals are reaching that 20%. You’re going to provide your folks with a great buffer against burnout,” she said.