Published on: October 20, 2025 at 2:31 pm
The biggest challenge of hybrid working arrangements is not about where, how, or even when people work. Rather, it’s the erosion of trust between leadership and employees during—and since—the Covid-19 pandemic.
“After talking to a lot of folks about remote work, hybrid arrangements, and return-to-office mandates, one of the things I was struck by is the lack or the deterioration of trust within organizations,” said Academy of Management Scholar Sekou Bermiss of the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School.
“If you are an organization where the CEO has developed a good amount of trust with frontline employees, you can have frank conversations about your fears and your concerns about hybrid work or coming into the office,” he said.
However, Bermiss said, in interviews for his research, he has found a lot of mistrust on both sides of the divide between management and rank-and-file employees.
“Some employees feel that management is telling them to come in for this reason or that reason, but they don’t believe them,” Bermiss said. “They think that management just wants them to come in because they want to justify the expense of an office.
“The flip side for senior leadership is that they’ll say, ‘This is about bringing people in and the culture,’ but what they’re actually saying is, ‘I don’t trust that my employees are spending the amount of time working remotely that they say they’re working,’” he said.
Organizations must create a workspace that is built on transparency about hybrid working, and Bermiss said the first step is trying to reinforce or reestablish trust.
“There needs to be a little bit more vulnerability within organizations that will help build the trust that gets people to communicate and be productive, even when they aren’t in the office together, which hopefully leads to collaborative decisions about hybrid work,” Bermiss said.
