Leading hybrid teams: the 10 biggest challenges of hybrid leadership

While hybrid work has long become part of everyday life for many employees in German companies, leading hybrid teams still feels like permanent improvisation for many managers. In conversations with team leads, HR professionals, and workplace managers, we repeatedly hear the same issues: a lack of transparency around attendance, increased coordination effort, uncertainty about policies and rules, resistance to desk sharing, challenges caused by fluctuating office occupancy, and a missing data foundation for making informed decisions.

This clearly illustrates the tension hybrid team leaders operate in. They are expected to build trust, keep teams connected, use office space efficiently, and deliver results. Yet to do so, they first need visibility, clear guidelines, reliable processes, and the right tools. Here are the 10 biggest challenges of leading hybrid teams—and how you can address them in your organization.

1. Lack of transparency around attendance and collaboration

In hybrid work environments, many leaders simply don’t know who is in the office, who is working remotely, and when teams actually meet in person. This lack of visibility doesn’t just complicate day-to-day coordination, it also makes short-term decisions, spontaneous meetings, or onboarding new employees more difficult. Team days require significant planning effort, in-person leadership becomes hard to manage, and it quickly feels like losing control.

Possible solutions:

• Transparent, team-based attendance overviews instead of individual tracking
• Clear rules defining when on-site presence makes sense (e.g. team days or workshops)
• A focus on outcomes rather than attendance monitoring
  

How deskbird can help:
With deskbird, you can see your team’s office presence at a glance. Employees view planned in-office days in their weekly office feed, while leaders get a clear team overview showing office and remote days of each team member, making coordination significantly easier.

2. Complex coordination of hybrid teams and work models

Many organizations operate with different work-from-home policies across teams, departments, or locations. Leaders often compensate for this complexity through manual coordination using spreadsheets, chats, and informal agreements. The result: teams work alongside each other rather than together, standards are missing, expectations remain unclear, and valuable time is lost to coordination.

Possible solutions:

• Company-wide guidelines with room for team-specific agreements
• Clear communication rules for hybrid collaboration
• Recurring on-site formats with defined objectives

How deskbird can help:
deskbird provides a central hybrid work platform where weekly planning, attendance, hybrid work policies, and team coordination come together. Coordination effort decreases, teams can transparently share their planned office days, and team leads can organize team days quickly—without additional Excel processes.

3. Change management and tool adoption

Introducing hot desking software to manage flexible work often presents leaders with significant challenges. Employees may be skeptical of new tools due to fears of added complexity, forced app usage, or perceived surveillance. Effective change management is essential, as is early involvement of the works council, since a desk sharing works agreement may be required to regulate certain aspects like transparency, data protection, and attendance tracking.

Possible solutions:

• Choosing a system that is easy to understand and intuitive to use
• Clearly communicating benefits and limitations of the chosen tool
• Early involvement of the works council and key stakeholders
• Pilot phases with selected user groups to build internal knowledge on how to use the tool
• Training, support, and subtle reminders to encourage adoption
  

How deskbird can help:
deskbird is designed for speed and simplicity, allowing employees to integrate new booking processes into their daily routines without extensive training. Transparent usage concepts and a clear focus on enablement rather than control support acceptance, also in discussions with works councils.

4. Resistance to desk sharing and new ways of working

Hybrid work is more than a work model. It’s a fundamental change in work routines, coordination, and rules. Letting go of a permanent desk is an emotional issue for many employees, which is why desk sharing is often perceived as forced, and new tools as additional workload. This is where leaders face a delicate balance: introducing efficient new concepts while maintaining trust and ensuring adoption and participation.

Possible solutions:

• Clear, transparent desk-sharing rules that ensure fairness and equal access to resources
• A strong focus on the benefits for employees (e.g. flexibility, team proximity, and predictability)
• Gradual rollout of new concepts instead of an abrupt transition
• Simple processes that outperform informal workarounds in day-to-day work life
  

How deskbird can help:
With interactive floor plans, intuitive booking, and configurable rules such as booking lead times, limits, or team zones, deskbird helps leaders implement desk sharing in a fair, transparent, and practical way.

5. Motivating employees to return to the office

Many managers leading hybrid teams face the same situation: well-equipped offices which sit empty. The issue is rarely a lack of commitment, it’s a lack of perceived value. When office presence has no clear purpose, it quickly feels mandatory, especially after extended periods of remote work. Leaders often lack concrete levers to encourage presence without applying pressure, and office attendance is frequently not communicated or contextualized well enough for employees to recognize its actual value.

Possible solutions:

• Creating clear reasons for in-office presence (e.g. team days, workshops, or social events)
• Making the office’s value visible through collaboration, knowledge sharing, and interaction
• Positioning leaders as facilitators of collaboration rather than mere orchestrators of in-office days
• Planning and communicating presence intentionally
• Using positive incentives rather than rigid mandates
  

How deskbird can help:
deskbird lets you easily organize and communicate team days and workplace events to foster collaboration and social interaction. Knowing which colleagues will be in the office is often a decisive factor for employees to come in themselves.

6. Difficulty enforcing, tracking, and standardizing hybrid work policies

Hybrid work policies present significant challenges for many leaders in German organizations. Compliance with defined in-office quotas is difficult to monitor, allowed work-from-home days are often exceeded, and different teams, departments, or even individual employees frequently operate under different rules and policies. Leaders have limited ability to actively manage these models, manual effort is high, and policy violations regularly lead to frustration and ongoing discussions.

Possible solutions:

• Company-wide guidelines combined with clearly defined, well-justified exceptions for specific teams or departments
• Centralized management of all hybrid work policies instead of fragmented solutions and manual lists
• Team-level transparency that supports planning without monitoring individual attendance
• Reducing manual effort through clear digital workflows and transparent, easy-to-understand rules

How deskbird can help:
deskbird’s hybrid work policies make attendance in hybrid work models visible, predictable, and fair. Create tailored remote or in-office policies for individual employees, teams, or the entire organization—and easily verify compliance using a clear and practical team overview.

7. Fair and transparent allocation of office resources

When office resources are scarce, fairness becomes a leadership issue. Favorite desks get blocked, parking spaces are “claimed,” and meeting rooms are booked way too far in advance. Without clear prioritization rules, frustration quickly builds up, especially when individual teams create their own systems or when project-based teams and external collaborators enter the mix. Team leads also need the ability to coordinate resources for their teams without relying on workarounds.

Possible solutions:

• Clear, consistent booking and prioritization rules that are transparent and easy for everyone to understand
• Limited advance booking windows and reservation durations to prevent long-term blocking of resources
• Different zones and access rights to account for different teams, roles, and project-based divisions
• The ability for team leads to book resources on behalf of their teams

How deskbird can help:
With clearly configurable booking rules, roles, and areas, teams maintain visibility while leaders can actively manage resources and fine-tune booking options. In addition, desks can be assigned to specific employees where fixed seating is required.

8. Handling no-shows, long-term bookings, and “office beach towels”

What many people only associate with reserving pool loungers on vacation has become a real challenge for hybrid team leaders in everyday office management. Employees book desks and meeting rooms weeks in advance, forget to cancel when they’re on vacation or sick, or simply don’t show up despite having a booking. The result: high utilization on paper, empty spaces in reality, and significantly more difficult capacity planning.

‍Possible solutions:

• Clear and consistent rules for booking, cancellation, and resource usage
• Time-limited booking windows and reservation durations to prevent long-term blocking
• Automatic no-show logic that releases unused resources
• Sensible buffer times and cancellation rules so desks and rooms can be rebooked quickly
• Data transparency to identify patterns and take targeted action

How deskbird can help:

deskbird reduces no-shows and long-term bookings through a variety of check-in options, booking lead times, and booking limits. Desk and room bookings that are not checked into are automatically released, making actual utilization visible and giving leaders a reliable basis for managing bookings and resources.

9. Capacity challenges between space shortages and empty offices

Many hybrid team leaders regularly face a paradoxical situation: on some days, there simply isn’t enough space in the office, while on others, large areas sit unused. Rapid company growth, downsizing after the introduction of hybrid work models, and the continued use of permanently assigned desks in certain teams all contribute to inefficient space utilization and make planning extremely difficult. Employees end up working from meeting rooms or shared areas, remote employees and freelancers struggle to find a desk when they need to be on site, and no one wants to commute to the office in vain.

‍Possible solutions:

• A combination of shared desk models and transparent booking to reflect actual capacity
• Visibility into office utilization and peak days to better manage and spread office presence
• Flexible use of office space with dedicated zones for focus work, collaboration, and project work
• Clear communication about when office presence makes sense and how desk availability is ensured

How deskbird can help:

With deskbird, employees can see in advance whether and where desks are available and plan their office days accordingly. At the same time, utilization and usage data provide a reliable foundation for identifying peak times and optimizing office space over time.

10. Lack of data for informed leadership decisions

What we repeatedly hear from hybrid leaders and workplace managers is that they lack meaningful analytics on office usage, desk occupancy, and team attendance. As a result, many hybrid work decisions are driven by gut feeling and subjective perceptions such as “the office is always empty” or “we need less space.” Without reliable data on utilization, peak days, and usage patterns, it becomes difficult to build a solid case with leadership and other stakeholders or to implement targeted, effective measures.

Possible solutions:

• Structured collection and analysis of booking and attendance data
• Using analytics to identify patterns and trends rather than relying on individual opinions
• Regular reviews of office and team usage to support continuous optimization
• Data-driven decision-making for space planning, presence formats, and team routines

How deskbird can help:
deskbird’s built-in workplace analytics provides leaders and decision-makers with reliable data and insights into utilization, no-shows, and usage patterns that reveal how the office is actually being used. This enables organizations to refine spaces, policies, and hybrid work models based on evidence rather than assumptions.

Conclusion: Successfully leading hybrid teams requires structure, transparency, and the right tool

Managers leading hybrid teams face a combination of operational and cultural challenges. They’re expected to coordinate collaboration across teams that alternate between office and remote work, make on-site presence meaningful, allocate resources fairly, keep rules practical, and build acceptance—all while often lacking reliable tools or data.

Success ultimately depends on a few key factors: transparency, clear guidelines and rules, simple booking and check-in processes, automation to reduce no-shows, and a solid data foundation for decision-making. This is exactly where modern workplace management solutions like deskbird come into play.

‍deskbird provides organizations with an all-in-one platform for workplace management and hybrid team leadership, combining intuitive desk and room booking with practical features for managing hybrid teams and powerful workplace analytics. Book a free demo with one of our experts and experience the platform first-hand—tailored to your real-world use cases.