What Hybrid Work Does to Company Culture

Karin Hurt spent more than 25 years in HR at Verizon Wireless before building Let's Grow Leaders, a training firm focused on human centered leadership development that has helped over 10,000 leaders across more than 14 countries. She is a bestselling author, culture coach and keynote speaker, and Inc Magazine recently named her to its list of the top 100 great leadership speakers.

In this episode of CultureClub X, host Nicole Patrick sits down with Karin to unpack what remote and hybrid work has actually done to company culture. The core question runs through the whole conversation: when the old default ways of working disappear, how do leaders rebuild culture on purpose so that everyone, whether they are in the room or on a screen, still gets a fair shot and an equal voice?

Karin keeps returning to one idea: deliberateness. From the definition of culture she borrows from marketing thinker Seth Godin to the systems that make feedback feel safe, she argues that almost nothing good in a hybrid workplace happens by accident anymore. Leaders have to choose it.

Why hybrid work forced every leader to redefine culture

Karin describes the pandemic as an emotional and strategic pivot that pushed almost every organization into reinventing itself. People started doing things in radically different ways, liking some of it and disliking other parts, and now they are collectively asking what they actually want work to be.

Her favorite definition of culture comes from Seth Godin: people like us do things like this. In a hybrid or virtual environment, that question becomes harder to answer, because people want genuinely different things while the company still carries its own objectives.

What used to happen by default, the hallway chat and the shared assumptions, can no longer be assumed. Karin's point is that leaders now have to take a deliberate step back and ask what they are building, rather than letting culture drift.

How do you keep remote employees from being left behind

A big share of Karin's client work is making sure nobody gets left behind, and she warns that leaders often cause harm without realizing the impact. She shares a leadership program where half the group was in the room and half was online, an accident caused by travel issues, which put her on the hybrid receiving end and forced constant adjustments.

Another session had a global executive on the big screen from London because he had COVID but was only contagious, not very sick. As a professional facilitator, Karin says it took every ounce of energy to keep remembering he was there while the room carried the conversation.

Her guidance is to keep asking how the meeting felt for the people on the other end, and to name the risk out loud instead of pretending it does not exist.

Why an open door is not enough for honest feedback

The research behind Karin's book Courageous Cultures started from a pattern she kept seeing: senior leaders asking why people would not speak up, while frontline employees told her nobody wanted their ideas. To settle it, her team ran an extensive study with the University of North Colorado.

The ideas people held back were not trivial. They were not asking for kombucha in the break room or virtual Taco Tuesdays. They were sitting on ideas that would improve the customer experience, the employee experience or a process, exactly the ideas a business needs.

The reasons were sobering. 49 percent said they were not regularly asked for their ideas, 50 percent said nothing would ever happen anyway, 67 percent said their manager operated around this is the way we have always done it, and 40 percent said they were simply scared, something Karin calls FOSU, fear of speaking up.

That is why she treats an open door as a start rather than a solution, and why she pushes leaders toward deliberate systems and a real employee feedback loop that tells people what happened with their ideas.

What actually makes people speak up on a video call

To draw out honest input, Karin's team ends leadership programs by staying in the Zoom room until everyone has gone, just as they would linger in a conference room. That is when the juicy questions arrive, often from the three people who hang back once the recording stops.

She also mixes up the medium on purpose. Breakout rooms make it hard for someone to hide the way they can in a room of 25 with the camera off, and priming people to type their best idea into the chat pulls quieter voices into the conversation.

Crucially, she reminds leaders that facilitation is a skill. An IT director has a day job and was never trained to run an engaging virtual meeting, so giving managers real resources and techniques makes a measurable difference.

Deliberate togetherness still beats a free for all

Karin warns leaders not to let the pendulum swing too far toward all remote just because it is cheaper than real estate and travel. One client calls the answer office occasional: be deliberate about the occasions, so people come in for an ideation session, strategic planning or a kickoff, not simply because they can.

She illustrates the point with a conference in Phoenix where an early morning swim with three strangers, all there for the same association, turned into dinners and real relationships. A quiet aside walking to the restroom at an offsite produced a candid ask she doubts would have come over the phone.

A real estate leader told her about a once loved shared room that now sits vacant, because people got used to working their own way and nobody wants to be the only one there. It is a downward spiral, and Karin's fix is to give the space a genuine reason to exist again.

Clarity comes before flexibility

Flexibility without clarity, Karin argues, is a trap. After two years of what one leader called stroking employees' hair and saying whatever you want, please do not resign, she says the real work is defining what success looks like at every level before loosening the rules.

Some roles simply cannot flex the same way. A call center has to plan coverage so customers are not left waiting, so the honest move is to name the parameters, the goal, the budget and the regulatory limits, rather than pretend everything is negotiable.

Her favorite example is her daughter-in-law, a call center employee and foster parent whose company had no foster care policy and invited her to help build one. That respect, Karin says, produced radical loyalty even on hard days.

Protecting people from burnout takes real parameters

Karin points to research showing people work more, not less, from home, and admits that even she and her husband and business partner David had to agree to keep business talk out of the living room. Boundaries, she says, are just another form of parameters.

Small deliberate policies help. One client starts every meeting five minutes after the hour so people can exhale, note action items and get water. Amazon protected each person's lunch hour across global teams, which she says also teaches compassion and empathy for a colleague in another time zone.

Another client made emails after 7 p.m. optional to answer, so a message marked urgent still waits until morning. The catch, Karin notes, is that leaders have to live by the rule and not get fussy when someone honors it.

Continuous listening is the closest thing to a hybrid playbook

With no established playbook for hybrid work, Karin's throughline is to keep listening and keep responding. In Courageous Cultures terms she calls it responding with regard: thank people for an idea, tell them what is or is not happening with it, and invite them to keep contributing.

That is where continuous listening earns its place. Checking in with employees regularly, turning what they say into actionable insight from a pulse survey, and actually acting when two or three people raise the same thing is how trust compounds in a distributed team.

The takeaway from Karin's conversation with Nicole is steady and human: hybrid culture is not something you inherit, it is something you build on purpose, one deliberate decision, and one heard voice, at a time.