Hybrid Work: How to Design an Office Attendance Policy Your Team Sees as Fair

Two Groups on the Same Team, Not Hearing the Same Things

Picture a consulting firm in Chiang Mai that requires people in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays and lets them work anywhere the rest of the week. "Muk" lives near the office. She comes in every required day and often stays a little after work to talk with the manager in person. "Den" lives in Lamphun. He comes in on the right days, but on Tuesday he misses a conversation in the kitchen that changed the order of a client's work, because nobody wrote it down.

By the end of the month Den feels like an outsider, even though he has followed the policy fully. Muk did not mean to leave him out. She simply heard it first because she was standing there. The policy was announced in a single email, and nobody asked which days people could realistically come in, or what would happen to those who did not hear the kitchen conversation.

Hybrid work fails when the physical office becomes the place where information flows, and the work-from-home days become the place where people wait for a summary.

What Hybrid Does to Work and Resignations

A study published in Nature in 2024 by Nicholas Bloom and colleagues was a six-month randomized experiment with 1,612 employees of Trip.com, a Chinese technology company, in 2021-2022. The group that worked from home two days a week had a resignation rate roughly one third lower. The figure in the paper reports a 33% reduction in resignations overall, compared with the group that came to the office five days. A null-equivalence test found no effect on performance grades over the following two years, and no evidence of a difference in promotions. A Stanford Report article dated 12 June 2024 summarized the same study as showing that people who worked from home two days a week were no less productive and no less likely to be promoted than people who were in the office full time.

This is an experiment at a single company, with college-educated employees working in a Shanghai office. It is not an average of all companies in Thailand. But it is one of the larger randomized experiments on hybrid schedules, and it separates "not coming in five days" from "work gets worse" quite clearly.

The other side is whether people feel a policy is fair. Gallup's Hybrid Work page, which draws on US employee data, says that teams who help set their hybrid policy are the group most likely to see the policy as fair and as good for collaboration. But as of May 2025, only 11% of employees benefited from this approach. The page does not give the percentage of that group who said the policy was fair, so we will not guess a figure. This data is from the US, not Thailand. What can be taken from it is the direction: dictating a number of days without asking the team does not by itself go together with fairness.

Microsoft's Work Trend Index from September 2022, which surveyed 20,000 people in 11 countries, found that 54% of managers of hybrid teams said they had less visibility into their team members' work, compared with 38% of managers who work in the office. This gap is the source of policies that push for more days in the office, even though the problem may be visibility of the work, not the number of days.

Design a Policy the Team Can Explain

Ask Before You Announce the Number of Days

Start with questions, not with the number that leadership prefers. Which work needs to happen in the same room? Which work can be delivered from home? Which days can most people actually come in without disrupting school runs or travel from another province?

Write the answers as a short policy that someone can explain to others in one minute. If it cannot be explained, it is still a mix of exceptions and not yet a policy.

Give Everyone the Same Information, Wherever They Sit That Day

A rule that would have fixed Den's problem is that decisions must be written down in a place that people who were not in the kitchen can open. Conversations in the office can still happen, but the conclusion does not end with that conversation.

Set one place for each project's conclusions. People at home that day can read them within the day, instead of waiting until the next office day.

Don't Measure Commitment by the Number of Days People Are Seen

In the Trip.com experiment, performance grades and promotions did not get worse because of two days at home. Using the number of days someone appears in person as a stand-in for performance penalizes people who do all their work but live far away, and it does not buy any additional quality of work.

Measure by work delivered, decisions that are written down, and clients who have received what they were promised. How to discuss this with team leads is covered in Managing a Remote Team.

Write the Agreement to Match the Law, If Work Happens Off-Site

In Thailand, letting people work from home should not be left as a verbal understanding alone. Section 23/1 concerns agreements on working outside the workplace and the right to refuse contact after working hours. It is explained in Work From Home Law. That article is not legal advice. Before issuing a policy, have a qualified professional review the wording.

Review in Cycles, Don't Announce and Walk Away

Schedule a review after six to eight weeks. Ask two groups specifically: people for whom coming to the office is convenient, and people who can only come on the required days. If the second group is still missing information, the problem is not their effort. It is where the information flows.

Put Home Days and Office Days in the Same Office

A fair policy needs a place where everyone can see each other, even if on that morning Muk is at the office and Den is in Lamphun.

Zyra World is an office that stays open all day, whether people are sitting at home or at the physical office. Avatars share one map, people can walk over and talk by voice based on distance, and conclusions live in channels that can be searched later. Someone who did not hear the kitchen conversation does not have to wait until next Tuesday.

To see how this kind of space differs from scheduling meetings, read Online Office, and for how to choose tools, see How to Choose an Online Office.

Google Meet Stays for Scheduled Meetings, and Zyra Covers the Time Between

Google Meet is still the right choice when you need people inside and outside the organization to gather at a set time, with an agenda, and then finish. A hybrid policy does not require dropping Meet.

What Meet does not do is let Den see that Muk is free in the afternoon and walk over to ask about what changed in the kitchen that morning. That is where Zyra fits: an office that stays open alongside scheduled meetings, not another meeting program.

Before You Send the Next Policy Email

Give the current version to two kinds of people: someone for whom the office is convenient, and someone who lives far away. Ask whether they can explain the rules in one minute, and what conclusions they missed last week because they were not in the room. If there is something they cannot answer, fix that before adding more days.

You can open a shared office in the browser with Zyra. Teams of up to 25 members can start for free.

Start using Zyra for free for up to 25 members

Frequently Asked Questions

What is hybrid work?

It is when people on the same team split their time between a workplace and somewhere else, such as home, with shared rules about which days they meet and where the information they need is kept. It is more than occasionally allowing work from home without any agreement.

How many days should people come to the office?

There is no right number for every team. In the Trip.com experiment, people worked from home two days a week, and no negative effect on performance grades or promotions was found. That figure belongs to that company. Your team should start from the work that really has to be done together, and then set the days.

Why do people at home feel it is unfair when the policy is the same for everyone?

Because conversations that are not written down reach the people in the room first. Fairness in hybrid work depends on access to conclusions, not on being seen equally every minute.

How is a policy set together with the team better than one handed down?

Gallup data from the US, as of May 2025, says teams that set their policy together are the group most likely to see the policy as fair, but only 11% of employees used that approach. So asking the team is still the exception, not the default.

Do we need a written agreement?

If you have an employee work outside the workplace under Section 23/1, the agreement has a form set by law. The details are in the law article, and a qualified professional should review it before real use.