How to Improve Remote Engagement in Hybrid Work

Employees who are unengaged with their team leaders cannot attribute this to remote or hybrid work.

As a social psychologist who has been working with team dynamics since 2010, I have repeatedly seen how engagement problems are exposed in virtual and hybrid teams and how these problems are already embedded in so many organizational cultures.

For many, the pandemic made corridor conversations and informal catch-ups that build trust difficult, if not impossible. What remained was a more honest picture of who is engaged and who isn’t.

This article is a practical guide to diagnosing and rebuilding remote engagement in remote and hybrid teams, drawing on the experiences of manager of hybrid teams Edisa Kapur, as well as other practitioners whom I had the pleasure of interviewing.

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Hybrid Equity and Inclusion

Have you ever joined an online meeting five minutes late? Once you enter the virtual space, you often see a few people having conversations, while others look like they are working on something else as they wait for the meeting to start.

Maybe it is difficult to understand what people are talking about because the technical infrastructure doesn’t allow full access to the conversation (Parker, 2018). These are scenarios frequently reported in hybrid teams.

What is even worse is when the virtual part of the team hears about a decision made by their in-office colleagues after the meeting ended. This is what happens when an organization builds a hybrid model without asking whose experience of work they designed their processes around.

In a hybrid workplace, proximity bias does not disappear. In my experience, it gets amplified. The office becomes the center, and everyone outside it is at varying distances from visibility, influence, and opportunity (Mortensen & Haas, 2021).

The result, if left unaddressed, is what researchers call the two-track workplace: Remote and in-office employees are doing the same jobs but experiencing fundamentally different organizations (Allen et al., 2015; Williamson et al., 2024).

To unite a two-track workplace, you first need to understand the underlying issues behind disengagement. The following quick triage guide can help identify potential engagement issues.

Quick Start: 10-Minute Remote Engagement Triage

Most engagement issues in remote or hybrid teams fall into one of six domains. Choosing the one that best describes your team right now lets you use that lever as your starting point.

Choose one primary driver of disengagement and one secondary. Avoid ambiguity and be honest about what you see surfacing in the team dynamic.

Implementation: Run one intervention at a time

Use this decision matrix to identify your team’s primary symptom, find the most likely cause, and choose one intervention to pilot over the next two weeks.

Step 1 – Choose one lever based on your triage.
Step 2 – Define the smallest repeatable practice or ritual.
Step 3 – Make one person responsible.
Step 4 – Choose one leading indicator to use for measurement. Define it before you begin the pilot intervention.
Step 5 – Review whether the intervention worked. Adapt it when necessary or make it a standing practice.

We will discuss the six most important levers below.

What “Engagement” Means in Remote/Hybrid Teams

Employee engagement is distinct from satisfaction or happiness at work, and it is not employee retention. Although they are valuable indicators of healthy engagement at the team and company level, engagement itself is better understood as a psychological state characterized by dedication, energy, and involvement in work.

From an employee perspective, engagement is the sense that their effort is meaningful, visible, and connected to something larger (Harter et al., 2002).

In remote and hybrid teams, many forms of informal employee recognition that occur naturally in a shared physical environment, such as spontaneous feedback, social interactions, and the incidental acknowledgment of someone’s work or presence, are removed.

The only way to replace them is with specifically designed structures that build these spontaneous interactions online.

Three dynamics shape the intervention examples in this article:

1. Proximity bias
   In-office workers receive informal visibility that remote colleagues structurally do not (Allen et al., 2015).
2. Asynchronous communication
   Trust and coordination don’t build themselves when most of your team’s communication happens through messages rather than conversations. They have to be designed (Yang et al., 2022).
3. Emotional opacity
   Disengagement rarely announces itself. The early signals of disengagement, such as low energy, withdrawal, and friction, are visible only to managers who actively look for them (Goleman, 1998; Morrison-Smith & Ruiz, 2020).

Diagnose With Triangulation, Not Surveys Alone

Surveys alone will not tell you what is actually going on.

The most useful measurement systems combine a short monthly check-in to catch early movement in key areas such as energy, connection, and workload, with a deeper conversation twice a year to understand what is driving the numbers (Harter et al., 2002).

Asking the following two questions as a simple written prompt or in a real conversation will often get you further than a full survey: What made it hardest to do good work this month? What could we stop doing that would help the team?

Rather than waiting for a score to drop, start watching the signals that show up first: How many hours of meetings are people sitting through each week? Are the same few voices dominating every call (Edmondson, 1999)? Are people messaging after hours, and is anyone actually taking time off (Mazmanian et al., 2013)?

Hybrid team manager Edisa Kapur points out that repeated frustration among employees is a sign of system misalignment and an early sign of disengagement. Frustration is often a sign that something isn’t right with the infrastructure. People’s emotions are the fastest diagnostic tool a manager has (Goleman, 1998).

The Six Levers of Remote Engagement

There are six levers that you can use to improve remote engagement.

Lever 1: Belonging and connection: Design for it; don’t force it

The sense of belonging and connection deteriorates or never solidifies in remote teams, not because the people don’t like one another, but because the informal structures and “weak ties” are missing (Granovetter, 1973).

Remote teams have to consciously design occasional chats with colleagues in virtual breakout sessions, five-minute calls, or virtual coffees so colleagues can just chat while taking a break.

Many companies schedule these types of casual gatherings for their virtual teams outside work hours, which is why they often fail. They need to be part of the work hours, as they are in physical teams.

These loose, low-intensity connections create a sense of belonging to a wider community, expose employees to new information, and make an organization feel like a place rather than just a job (Granovetter, 1973; Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Trust is built in informal spaces, such as at the end of a meeting or during spontaneous catch-ups (Parker, 2018).

• Start with something human
  Open every meeting with one specific personal question, not “How are you?” but “What are you looking forward to? What did you do last weekend?” Take three minutes to set a different tone.
• Rotating pair calls
  Every two weeks, encourage two colleagues who don’t usually work together to have a 15-minute call with no agenda.
• Virtual coffee breaks
  Protect five minutes before or after meetings for unstructured talk to create virtual coffee breaks.
• A non-work channel with a purpose
  Give it a specific weekly prompt, like sharing a photo, book, or something that energizes you. Specificity matters: “Share anything” produces silence.
• Celebrating small wins
  Create a standing slot in a weekly message or meeting where someone names one thing that went well. This creates a rhythm of positive visibility.
• Onboarding
  Social integration in the first 30 days predicts long-term belonging (Huffington, 2014; Baumeister & Leary, 1995). A virtual buddy system and structured peer introductions matter more than any onboarding document.

Lever 2: Operating system: Reduce meeting load

Remote and hybrid teams default to more meetings when team operating systems lack clarity and coordination, as well as shared norms for how decisions are made, information flows, and work is handed off.

But meetings need to have a clear purpose and a repeatable format with an expected outcome. What is the purpose of the meeting? Do you need a decision, support, or information? If you cannot answer these questions, don’t hold the meeting. Meeting load is a leading contributor to disengagement (Parker, 2018).

Here is how you can test this lever:

Two-week pilot:

• Cancel or shorten one recurring meeting.
• Create a written record of your team’s decisions with explanations, not just conclusions.
• Agree on what “done” looks like for one task.
• Measure meeting hours per person per week.
• Each Friday ask, “On a scale from 1 to 5, how clear were our decisions this week without a meeting?”

Lever 3: Autonomy and trust: Prioritize outcomes over presence

A flexible work policy, without autonomy, is like a double burden. Providing teams with freedom, but then checking whether they are online every hour does not offer flexibility. It is simply a friendlier name for control. The performance benefits of remote work depend on the degree of autonomy a person actually experiences (Gajendran & Harrison, 2007).

Moving from measuring presence to agreeing on outcomes is especially necessary when building remote engagement in teams.

Ask: What does good work look like? By when? To what standard?

How and when the work gets done are up to the employee, but you need clear answers to these questions. For many employers, this is not just a culture shift; it is a mindset shift.

Psychological safety is what enables team members to speak up, take a risk, or disagree without worrying that it will be held against them because you have built trust together (Edmondson, 1999).

The fastest way to build trust is when leaders lead first. Name your own uncertainty, welcome pushback, and treat a different opinion as a contribution rather than a challenge (Grant, 2021).

“If I set the tone—give my team permission to share their feelings—this is the reason they come back to me and share openly. This creates a bond.”

– Edisa Kapur (personal communication, March 2, 2026)

Lever 4: Equity and visibility: Reduce proximity bias

Recognition and visibility make remote contributions difficult to overlook (Mroz et al., 2019).

Proximity bias is the unconscious tendency to favor people who are physically closest to us. These are the ones who get pulled into impromptu conversations, come to mind first for opportunities, or get the benefit of the doubt in performance reviews (Allen et al., 2015; Williamson et al., 2024).

To counter this, design recognition and visibility into the operating structure:

• Identify culture carriers and make them visible by involving them in hiring, onboarding, and cross-team conversations.
• Give credit publicly with a clear norm: Name the person, the behavior, and the impact.
• Rotate presenters and facilitators so visibility is shared rather than‌ concentrated in the office.
• Run a quarterly audit of who receives stretch opportunities and recognition and where they work (Grant, 2021).

When recognition and visibility are intentional and specific, they reduce proximity bias structurally rather than relying on individual goodwill.

Lever 5: Growth and job crafting: Offer role redesign

Most people, when possible, take the opportunity to quietly reshape their work, with or without permission. We call this process job crafting, which involves reshaping tasks, relationships, and cognitive framing to better align with our values and strengths (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001).

This is one of the most effective motivational strategies at work because it allows the person to create meaning. In remote and hybrid teams, invite employees to volunteer opportunities, share projects that are outside their visibility, and even share information that came up in a side conversation.

One way to enable job crafting is through one-on-one meetings. Ask questions such as, “What energizes you most right now? If you could redesign one part of your role, what would it be?”

Edisa Kapur’s (personal communication, March 2, 2026) instinct as a manager is telling: “I always try to avoid people being bored. What can be the spice in this task? How to change it, adapt it, or even automate and get rid of it?” That is not just good management. That is job crafting in action.

Lever 6: Wellbeing and retention: Introduce recovery rituals

While flexibility is great, it can also easily spiral into a feeling of permanent obligation. Norms and boundaries around working hours are a necessary tool to prevent burnout, which can easily contribute to disengagement, as I have seen in my work building remote teams.

Burnout is also a sign that the company has not designed the necessary structures (Maslach et al., 2001).

Organizations need to include wellbeing in the workflow as micro-steps, rather than an add-on program, because small habits done consistently build the work culture (Huffington, 2014).

Edisa Kapur (personal communication, March 2, 2026) reframes the problem: “It’s not about work–life balance. It is about emotional balance. You need to make sure that your work is a great place to work so your emotions are easier to balance.”

In practical terms, that means protected blocks of time for focused work, agreed norms about when it is and is not reasonable to expect a response, a shared list of low-value work the team has decided to stop doing, and genuine permission to log off.

These two signals are worth tracking:

1. Are people actually using their time off?
2. Are messages being sent late at night?

PositivePsychology.com Resources Section

Besides the decision matrix shared earlier, we have several other resources at PositivePsychology.com that can improve engagement at work.

The team-building exercise Getting to Know Each Other helps you build trust and connection across distances by using breakout rooms to facilitate vulnerable storytelling and active listening among colleagues.

This GROW worksheet provides you with a structured framework to help your teams collaboratively establish SMART goals, explore current realities, brainstorm options, and map out a clear path to success.

The True and False Exercise is a team-building activity designed to enhance communication and trust by having participants share personal stories, some true and some false, to practice active listening and discernment within a group setting. It can be easily done on smaller virtual calls with up to nine people.

If you’re looking for more science-based ways to help others develop positive leadership skills, this collection contains 17 validated positive leadership exercises. Use them to equip leaders with the skills needed to cultivate a culture of positivity and resilience.

A Take-Home Message

Disengagement in remote and hybrid teams is not a motivation problem; instead, it is a system and design problem. The informal structures that build trust, visibility, and belonging in physical offices do not translate to digital environments on their own. They have to be rebuilt intentionally. The six levers can help you establish remote engagement.

Pick one of the six levers and run it as a practice, instead of a program. Make it a company habit, measure one thing before you start, and adjust along the way.

And remember, equity does not happen automatically in a hybrid environment, but inequity does.

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