The difficult question in hybrid work is often not where an employee sits. It is whether that employee can find the person who knows something the immediate team does not. A well-connected colleague may navigate the organization easily from almost anywhere. A new starter or someone outside an established network may struggle even while surrounded by people. In hybrid work, access to expertise decides how quickly people get unstuck.
This shifts the design problem from attendance alone to access to expertise. Organizations need ways for employees to discover relevant people, understand their context and approach them without depending entirely on informal familiarity.
Office time can also support those connections, and digital tools can support them too. Neither works automatically. The evidence suggests that different work arrangements produce different effects, so management should define the collaboration problem it is trying to solve rather than treating all remote or hybrid arrangements as one category.
What hybrid work studies say about expertise
A randomized experiment at Trip.com involved 1,612 employees and a schedule with two home-working days per week. Attrition was 4.8% in the hybrid group versus 7.2% in the comparison group, without detected adverse performance or promotion effects. The result concerns selected roles in one company, not every form of remote work. Bloom, Han and Liang
A separate study of 61,182 Microsoft US employees during early 2020 found more siloed collaboration networks and greater use of asynchronous communication under firm-wide remote work. It used a natural-experiment design in a pandemic setting; communication patterns were not direct measures of individual productivity. Yang and colleagues
Still, these results are not a simple contradiction. They examine different arrangements, outcomes and populations. A retention benefit under a defined hybrid schedule can coexist with concerns about cross-group connections under a sudden fully remote arrangement.
The useful management response is to separate the outcomes. Retention, individual performance, access to expertise and development of new relationships deserve their own measures.
Access to expertise in hybrid work is uneven
Employees do not begin with equal access to organizational knowledge. Some know the informal specialists, the reliable introducers and the teams that own particular problems. Others know only the people in their reporting line.
A hybrid arrangement can make this difference more visible. The employee with a strong network can send a well-directed message. The employee without one may broadcast a question, wait for a response or ask the wrong team.
A directory can reduce the discovery gap for hybrid work expertise, but only if it contains useful context. Names and titles may identify a department without revealing who has relevant experience. A profile needs enough evidence to help the user decide whether a contact is plausible.
Research on expertise recommendation treats finding help as a social and contextual process, including referral. That remains a useful warning against treating a search ranking as a complete answer. McDonald and Ackerman
The design should make it easy for an initial contact to redirect a question. A successful referral can be as valuable as a correct first match.
Give encounters a purpose
However, bringing employees into the same building only creates an opportunity for contact. It does not guarantee that people from different teams will meet or discuss useful work.
Managers should therefore identify which connections to hybrid work expertise need deliberate support. New starters may need introductions beyond their immediate team. Project groups may need access to a specialist community. Teams facing a recurring problem may benefit from a regular clinic or a short cross-functional review.
Therefore, the purpose should determine the format. A difficult, ambiguous issue may justify a live discussion. A request for a known procedure may be better handled through a maintained resource and an accountable contact. Scheduling a meeting for every question can consume the capacity of the very experts the organization needs to make accessible.
Office days can be designed around activities that benefit from shared presence. That is different from assuming that physical attendance itself demonstrates collaboration or productivity.
The same discipline applies online: a virtual event needs a reason for people to connect, not merely a video link.
Make asynchronous contact useful
For example, GitLab’s public communication handbook describes asynchronous work as a starting point, while recognizing situations that benefit from synchronous discussion and documenting conclusions. This is a company operating practice, not an independent claim that one communication pattern is optimal for every organization. GitLab Communication handbook
In hybrid work, a useful asynchronous request for expertise includes the problem, relevant context, what has already been tried and the decision needed. It allows the recipient to respond without a long sequence of clarification messages.
The directory can support this by helping the requester identify an appropriate person and understand their responsibility. It should also help users consider local time and contact preferences without interpreting presence as proof of capacity.
Teams need an escalation route for questions that remain unresolved. Asynchronous work should not mean indefinite waiting. The process can specify when to seek another contact, convene a discussion or escalate to an accountable owner.
Documenting the outcome prevents the same expertise request from being repeated unnecessarily. The record should be discoverable by the appropriate audience and maintained when the underlying answer changes.
Keep scarce hybrid work expertise from becoming a bottleneck
Making hybrid work expertise visible can also concentrate demand on a few people. A directory that succeeds at discovery may therefore reveal a capacity problem rather than solve it completely.
Consequently, the organization should watch for repeated dependency on the same specialists. The response may be to develop additional capability, create reusable guidance, establish office hours or distribute review responsibility. It should not simply encourage the expert to respond to more messages.
Recognition also matters. Helping colleagues across organizational boundaries is work, even when it does not appear in a project plan. Managers should consider that contribution when allocating time and evaluating responsibilities.
Employees should also be able to indicate an appropriate route for requests. A specialist may prefer a team channel, an intake form or a scheduled consultation for certain types of work. Clear routes improve coordination without requiring personal availability at all times.
The goal is a resilient network of capability, not a searchable list of people who become permanently overloaded.
Build relationships for people who are new to the network
New employees, in particular, need more than a reporting chart. They need to understand how work moves between teams, where to ask questions and which relationships are useful for their role.
A structured introduction process can connect them to operational partners, professional communities, and experienced colleagues, so hybrid work does not cut them off from expertise. The directory provides a reference after the introduction, helping them remember responsibilities and find the right contact again.
Similarly, transfers deserve attention. An experienced employee entering a new business area may have strong organizational knowledge but few relevant local connections. Treating the move as only an administrative update misses the social transition.
Likewise, temporary project assignments can create useful bridges, provided the work and time commitment are explicit. Employees should not be expected to build a network through invisible additional labor on top of a full workload.
The organization can assess whether these practices reach people across locations, schedules and employment arrangements rather than assuming everyone participates in the same way.
Measure connection quality without creating surveillance
Communication volume is, however, a poor standalone measure of collaboration. More messages can reflect useful coordination, repeated confusion or an overloaded process. A dense network does not automatically produce better decisions.
Use task-based questions instead. Can employees find relevant expertise in hybrid work? Do cross-team questions reach an accountable person? Are new starters developing contacts beyond the immediate team? Can a project continue when a particular specialist is unavailable?
A small number of structured interviews and observed journeys can reveal problems that aggregate communication data misses. Where network analysis is considered, it requires clear purpose, appropriate privacy safeguards and caution about individual interpretation.
Above all, do not turn a person’s number of contacts or messages into a simplistic performance score. The work of a specialist, analyst and operational manager creates different communication patterns.
The objective is to improve access and coordination, not to make employees optimize visible activity.
Connect people, context and the next step
TeamConnect AI can support expertise discovery, shared profiles, and organizational context within Microsoft Teams, which is where hybrid work expertise needs to be found. It can help employees move from a question to a plausible contact and understand the person’s role. Governed agent discovery can complement that route for suitable tasks while keeping human responsibility visible.
The organization still needs communication norms, purposeful introductions and time for cross-team assistance. A tool can make the network easier to navigate; it cannot create trust or capacity merely by displaying connections.
For the next hybrid-work review, select a few important questions that require expertise outside the immediate team. Trace how employees currently find help and where the process fails. Improving those paths provides a concrete basis for office activities, digital discovery and communication practices that support the work people actually need to do.
References
- Bloom, Han and Liang: Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance. 2024.
- Yang et al.: The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers. 2022.
- McDonald and Ackerman: Expertise Recommender: A Flexible Recommendation System and Architecture. 2000.
- GitLab Communication handbook. 2026.