Balancing Productivity and Flexibility in Hybrid Work

Diane Sanford has spent more than 25 years in the restaurant industry, and she has seen its people challenges from just about every angle. As Chief People Officer at On The Border Mexican Grill and Cantina, she looks after a diverse workforce of over 5,000 people spread across more than 150 locations in 26 states. Before On The Border she led people teams at chains including Texas Land and Cattle, Lone Star Steakhouse, Chili's Grill and Bar, and Brinker International, building deep expertise in employee relations, talent acquisition, retention, and learning and development.

She joined host Nicole Patrick on CultureClub X to dig into the impact of remote and hybrid work on the modern workforce, and the practical question underneath it: how do people leaders balance productivity and flexibility once the office is no longer the default place work happens? It is a question the service industry feels especially sharply, since so much of its work simply cannot be done from a laptop at home.

Across the conversation Sanford kept returning to one idea. Culture is not an HR side project, it is the operating system of the business, and staying genuinely connected to employees is the only reliable way to manage it. What follows is how she thinks about connection, learning, retention, burnout, and flexibility for frontline teams.

Why true connection is the hardest thing to rebuild in hybrid work

Sanford said the biggest challenge people leaders face is not tools or policy, it is connection itself. A key component of office culture is atmosphere, seeing each other and being connected, and in a remote or hybrid setting those things happen very differently, if they happen at all. Humans, she argued, have to relearn how they build relationships.

She also pushed back on the comfortable idea that the need to belong faded once offices reopened. Before the pandemic there was a whole body of work about people needing a sense of belonging, and today that need is even more prevalent and more important, even as many workplaces pretend the disruption is over. Finding a way for people to feel truly connected to each other and to their employer is, in her view, the defining challenge of this era.

How HR can close the gap between remote and in-office teams

Asked how to solve the misalignment between remote and in-office staff, Sanford warned against trying to fix it in a vacuum. HR leaders need to talk to employees, learn what is and is not working in their current environment, and then close the gap between how work happens today and what the workforce actually needs. Remote and hybrid mean different things at different companies, so the diagnosis has to be local.

Underneath all of it is culture, which she framed as something every organization has whether it manages it or not. Managed well, it becomes a friend to the business. The failure mode she warned about most is treating culture as an HR possession, kept separate from how the company actually runs.

Her fix is iterative rather than heroic. HR cannot invent a magic solution alone; it needs feedback from the people affected and buy-in from every leader to act on it. Building that kind of employee feedback loop is what turns a diagnosis into change employees can actually feel.

What modern learning and development actually looks like

On learning and development, Sanford's advice was to take a page from society and lean into digital platforms. People spend hours a day on Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, and there are equivalent platforms for employee communication that let people pull information on demand, exactly when they need it.

The bigger shift is in how people absorb information at all. Learning has to respect how people consume content now: short, high-impact, single-topic videos blended with other formats, delivered with an awareness of the rhythm of the workplace so training does not land when people have no headspace for it. It is not a one size fits all model, and, as she put it, there has to be some common sense recognition that the year is 2022, not 1995.

Why flexibility and collaboration decide who stays

Asked about the role that a lack of collaboration, flexibility, and freedom plays in attrition, Sanford said those attributes mattered long before anyone labeled the workplace hybrid. The work now is to be purposeful about recreating what used to happen organically: the hallway conversations, the coffee catch-ups, the five-minute exchanges that no longer occur on their own.

She encouraged leaders to build structure that creates connection rather than assuming people are happy alone at home, from virtual happy hours to teams that deliberately talk to other teams and get their buy-in. That effort is not optional, because the return on it is real and shows up in how people bring themselves to work.

She was candid that this takes more work than it used to. When you could stand up, get a coffee, and swing by a colleague's office, connection was basically free. Today you have to check whether someone is available, whether the internet is working, whether there is time. It is much more of a production now, she said, but it is critically important.

How leaders can protect people from burnout

Sanford named video fatigue directly and pointed to the loss of natural movement in a remote day. Back-to-back meetings scheduled every hour on the hour, simply because you can, leave people exhausted by Tuesday. Her personal pet peeve was the Friday afternoon meeting, and she made a plain case for respecting the natural rhythm of when people actually want to work.

She also argued that mental health and wellness benefits, from virtual counseling apps to normalized conversations about self-care, are no longer optional extras. Employees want to feel seen and cared about as whole people, not just for the work they provide, and any company that ignores that, she suggested, will not be around for long.

Can the service industry offer flexibility too

The hardest question, Sanford admitted, is what flexibility means for frontline workers who cannot work from home. Restaurant, retail, and healthcare staff watch corporate colleagues work remotely while facing the very same life pressures, from homeschooling to caregiving, and that gap is hard.

Her answer was to get creative within the constraints of the business. Many restaurant companies write quality of life statements that cap hours, guarantee two days off in a row, and trigger early intervention when a manager is stuck working open to close. She cannot offer a virtual dining experience, but she can hire four people for shorter shifts instead of two for longer ones, and she can show up in person, because seeing the team and being seen does a great deal for both morale and a leader's credibility.

What hybrid work means for employee listening

The thread running through the entire conversation was listening. Sanford believes the balance of power has genuinely shifted, that for the first time the way people work is changing from the bottom up, and that the organizations that respond well will be the ones that thrive.

That is where continuous employee listening earns its place. Whether through pulse surveys, regular roundtables, or a simple question of the day, the goal is the same: stay close enough to the workforce to understand what people need, then communicate transparently about what you can and cannot give them. For an employee listening platform like CultureMonkey, which powers CultureClub X, that is exactly the discipline Sanford keeps circling back to. Connection you build on purpose, backed by feedback you are willing to act on, is what keeps culture, and the business, moving.