Healing the trauma of hybrid and remote working

Harvard Business Review Italia

Let’s talk about hybrid and remote working. How is this practice, originally created to revitalise the relationship between people and work, now causing strain for both organisations and individuals? We ask Michela Melchiori, Partner at Hermes Consulting.

Beyond its widespread adoption during the pandemic emergency as a public health measure, remote working originally aimed to revitalise the relationship between individuals and their work through shared accountability, with the ambition of uniting productivity and autonomy—two elements long considered contradictory.

The relationship between people and the workplace has always required various forms of adaptation, sometimes escalating into stress or burnout during particularly complex periods of organisational life.

Yet this sense of unease persists today, even though flexible working has become the norm. The newfound independence of individuals now clashes with core dimensions of professional life and organisational performance. For years, organisations have sought to improve teamwork to tackle rising complexity, breaking down functional silos to foster a genuine community: investing in inclusion, collective intelligence and cooperation to build flexible organisations capable of navigating uncertainty and renewing themselves to protect or grow market share.

However, today, the very autonomy brought about by remote working creates friction with revitalising these collective dimensions, overlooking the fact that people are not just individuals, but also need a sense of belonging.

In many organisations, we are seeing a shift from an old form of alienation to a new one, which directly undermines employee empowerment.

Neuroscience supports this view: research shows that the lack of face-to-face interactions in remote working can affect neurotransmitters linked to social connection. Dopamine, for instance, can drop when social ties weaken, dampening motivation and team engagement. Furthermore, blurred boundaries between work and personal life can trigger the autonomic nervous system, disrupting cortisol levels and other stress-response neurotransmitters, ultimately leading to heightened workplace conflict or, conversely, emotional withdrawal.

If this is what organisations are experiencing, we are facing a potential paradox: businesses embrace remote working to drive productivity, but instead end up with fragmentation that impairs organisational efficiency, ultimately threatening their long-term sustainability.

So, in light of these considerations, should we contemplate a return to the past?

I would say no, even though we see several companies wanting to do just that. People have experienced benefits in flexible working that cannot simply be replaced by financial compensation, and organisations would risk eroding value.

We must also remember that before the pandemic, belonging was closely tied to a physical space steeped in an implicit culture. Today, that physical anchor is increasingly fluid, making it essential to articulate cultural foundations and organisational behaviours explicitly to sustain engagement.

Organisations must therefore invest to counter alienation and help people build a genuine sense of belonging, coming together as a community that shares a common purpose and creates value. Emotional connection and collaborative problem-solving—both essential for effective cooperation—require physical spaces to unfold and strengthen through genuine, in-person interactions.

Can we identify the essential needs of teams and departments that risk being lost with remote working?

We put this to Francesca Carimati, Client Manager, who is leading the development of these programmes.

In our experience, teams and departments need to:

1. Reaffirm their foundational purpose by explicitly articulating their goals and shared values. This needs periodic renewal to sustain motivation;

2. Build mutual trust among members, which requires shared moments that foster genuine, human connection;

3. Collaborate inclusively, bridging physical distance and cross-functional silos;

4. Refocus through periodic, constructive review to discover new solutions to implement together;

5. Stay open to change, nurturing a mindset and practices geared towards continuous improvement and innovation.

Observing these needs highlighted an opportunity for us to contribute, also in our role as a Società Benefit, by making our thirty years of experience in facilitating leadership teams widely accessible, with an approach and cost structure tailored to support multiple teams and departments across an organisation.

To do this, we adapted our Outdoor Culturale® methodology, which rapidly blends relational and operational dynamics through high-impact experiential learning, using powerful metaphors and structured workshops to accelerate co-creation and problem-solving across these five core needs.

This led to the creation of RigeneraTEAM®, which are straightforward to organise, easily scalable across an organisation with targeted resources, and deliverable both indoors and outdoors.

These interventions incorporate an acceleration dynamic for transformation that we developed by integrating diverse fields, from neuroscience to the arts. They are genuine turning points where the challenges we have discussed find answers through expert facilitation and purposeful stimulus, bringing together energies and minds to strengthen team cohesion.

Our experience shows that participants value these sessions highly, as they respect personal time while delivering tangible results quickly through structured methodology and expert guidance. This represents a meaningful shift: moving away from frequent low-intensity interactions towards purposeful, high-intensity moments that truly empower teams seeking to sustain their vitality.

With the rise of artificial intelligence, will these human needs become obsolete?

Quite the opposite: artificial intelligence will only increase the need for organisations to differentiate themselves. Technology is universally accessible, if not immediately, then certainly in the medium term. The only true differentiator in a crowded, competitive landscape is the human contribution. However, for that contribution to give an organisation a clear identity, it must be deeply anchored in and aligned with its culture. It is therefore all the more vital to create the conditions for individuals and teams to actively champion the organisation’s identity and purpose.

How can organisations get in touch to explore your support?

You can contact Michela and me directly at: michela.melchiori@hermesconsulting.com and francesca.carimati@hermesconsulting.com