Improving In-Person Engagement in a Hybrid World—Without Mandates

Andrew M. Ibrahim MD, MSc is the George D. Zuidema Professor of Surgery, Architecture and Urban Planning and Vice Chair of Surgery at the University of Michigan. He currently Directs the Center for Healthcare Outcomes & Policy - a 100 person health policy research center - and has mentored more than two-dozen post-doctoral fellows and early-career faculty. He previously spent 6 years as the Chief Medical Officer and Senior Principal of the global design and architecture firm, HOK before founding StudioAMI.

??

Finding the right balance between in-person and virtual work is a challenge for many teams today. While remote work offers flexibility, in-person work brings intangible benefits—like personal mentoring, spontaneous collaboration, and a stronger sense of community—that can be tough to replicate virtually. I have avoided weighing in on the in-person / hybrid / virtual work debate, in-part, because I was in the middle of my own experiment with it for the last 4+ years.

We’ve been navigating this journey at our center, where we shifted from a fully remote model to a hybrid one. While some employees still choose to work remotely, we’ve seen in-person engagement more than double since we made a few intentional changes. The best part? We didn’t mandate anything. Instead, we focused on creating an office environment that would engage people to come in-person. Here’s how we did it:?

1. Redesigning the Office Space

The layout of our office used to be a maze of cubicles and poor lighting—great for heads-down work but not for collaboration. We made two major changes to the physical space:

• Flexible Gathering Spaces: We swapped out cubicles for movable tables, allowing us to create flexible workspaces that encourage collaboration and spontaneous interactions. These areas are great for group projects, brainstorming sessions, and cross-departmental conversations.
• Improving Natural Light: Our office only had one wall of windows, and cubicles next to those windows had high walls, blocking out light for the rest of the floor. By lowering some of these walls (or removing them entirely), we flooded the office with more natural light, making the space brighter and more inviting for everyone.

2. Adding Signature Features to Reflect Our Team's Personality

To make the office an actual destination, it had to be distinct from other offices. Our goal was to make the space instantly recognizable as belonging to our center. ?This involved both communal and individual signatures.

• Communal Signature Features. Because our 100 members all take on different projects and have different career goals, we needed our central shared space to reflect a communal mission. We renamed it, “Base Camp.” In hiking, this is the camp at the bottom of the trail where hikers who are about to summit, and those resting on their way back down, gather, share a meal and trade advice. The mural on our main wall gathering space is of Mount Everest and reinforces our theme of “Base Camp” helping each member plan their summit.
• Individual Signature Features. We also intentionally created signature spaces that reflected some more individual preferences of employees. This included a mini-golf course, a chess board, record player and a 3D printed guitar. Near these, we also placed White-Boards on wheels that helped prime spontaneous collaborations and idea sharing while people were moving through the floor.

3. Intentional Scheduling for Critical Mass

One of the toughest parts of hybrid work is figuring out when to come into the office. Without enough people around, it can feel like a ghost town. We made some focused efforts around our programming to help ensure that when people showed up, others would be there, too.

• Common In-Office Time. Leaders in our center also have other responsibilities at other sites. For example, I do surgery on Monday and have my clinic on Tuesdays. We worked within the cross-matrix of our organization to minimize other responsibilities on Fridays so that investigators could make that a common in-office day.
• Schedule Stacking. Many of the investigators and leaders at our center have their own teams and many direct reports. We encouraged them to stack their in-person meeting on the same day of the week, such that at least that group’s other members were also there for the day.

?

4. Building Rituals of Gathering

Essential to our growth of in-person engagement is a set of gathering rituals. These are events we do a on regular cadence with a specific goal. They include weekly Noon seminars for works in progress or “Data and Donuts” for our analysts to do code reviews. Our rituals have two features that make them successful:

• Purposeful Events. We rarely establish a ritual “just because”, but instead do it to respond to a specific need. For example, our ritual of quarterly mock study sections came in response to members wanting to demystify what happens in those meetings, and also to help pre-review a grant rigorously before it is submitted. ?
• Regular Cadence. Our rituals gain their strength because do them consistently. Some as frequent as weekly, others quarterly. By repeating them at regular intervals, they start to become an expectation and evolve as another “signature feature” of the workplace. They also provide a vehicle to reinforce our shared frameworks and mental models for the center.

We still provide hybrid access for flexibility, but we’ve seen a steady increase in the number of employees choosing to participate in person.?

Conclusion

Increasing in-person engagement doesn’t require strict mandates or top-down policies. By redesigning the office to foster collaboration, adding unique features that reflect your team’s culture, scheduling intentional in-office time, and building regular rituals that create a sense of community, you can create a work environment where employees are excited to engage in-person.