What's happening to our culture?

TL;DR

What's happening to our culture?

  • Hybrid working is settled in the UK: 28% of adults split their week, 74% of employers offer it, and a Nature-published RCT found it cut resignations by a third.
  • The channels that carried culture (corridor conversations, overheard norms, the ten minutes before a meeting) have thinned. Only 21% of employees feel connected to their culture.
  • New hires feel the gap first: pandemic-era hires are 47% more likely to consider leaving. AI is changing who people ask first.
  • Managers carry 70% of the variance in team engagement, yet they now experience the lowest engagement of any role.
  • The arrangement isn't the problem. The absence of a reading is.

Hybrid working is settled policy in the UK. The evidence says hybrid works. The question few organisations have answered is what's happening to the culture along the way.

Hybrid working in the UK isn't a debate any more. The ONS reports that 28% of working adults split their week between home and the office (ONS, Q1 2025). The CIPD puts employer adoption at 74% (CIPD, 2025). And the evidence on whether hybrid works is remarkably clear: the Trip.com randomised controlled trial, 1,612 employees, peer-reviewed in Nature, found that hybrid working cut resignations by a third with no loss in performance (Bloom, Han and Liang, Nature, 2024). Forty-one per cent of UK employers told the CIPD that hybrid raised productivity. Sixteen per cent said the opposite (CIPD, 2025).

The arrangement has settled. The question underneath the arrangement has not.

28% Of UK working adults split their week between home and office ONS, Q1 2025
74% Of UK employers now offer hybrid working arrangements CIPD, 2025
33% Reduction in resignations from hybrid working, with no loss in performance Bloom, Han and Liang, Nature 2024

The channels that carried culture

Culture used to travel without anyone managing the transmission. The desk cluster. The corridor conversation. The ten minutes before a meeting started. The lunch queue where a new hire overheard two senior colleagues disagree about a client and learned, without being taught, how the organisation handled disagreement.

Those channels haven't disappeared, but they've thinned. Atlassian's research across its own workforce found that only 19% of teams are co-located now, down from 61% before the pandemic (Atlassian, 2024). When four in five teams are distributed, the informal channels that carried culture, the tone, the norms, the sense of how things are done here, carry less.

This isn't an argument against hybrid working. The evidence runs firmly the other way. Gallup's 2026 data shows that hybrid and remote workers are more engaged than remote-capable employees who work entirely on-site (Gallup, 2026). The problem isn't the arrangement. The problem is that the arrangement changed what carries culture, and most organisations haven't noticed.

"Remote work doesn't break company culture. Poor measurement does."

- HR Executive, April 2026

The gap between the wall and the room

MIT Sloan's Culture 500 study analysed 1.2 million Glassdoor reviews across hundreds of large organisations and found that published values, the ones on the website, the ones in the induction pack, show zero correlation with the culture people actually experience (Sull, Sull and Turconi, MIT Sloan Management Review, 2020). Zero. The values on the wall and the culture in the room are measuring different things entirely.

Gartner surveyed 3,900 workers and found that only 25% of hybrid and remote employees feel connected to the culture they work in (Gartner, 2022). Three in four don't feel the connection. And the organisations where culture connectedness is high perform at a different level: 4.5 times more likely to be high-performing, 11.5 times more likely to be highly engaged (Gartner, 2024).

The connection to mission has fallen too. Gallup tracked a decline from 36% to 28% among remote workers and from 43% to 35% among hybrid workers between 2021 and 2023 (Gallup, 2023). The mission didn't change. The channels that carried the mission did.

0 Correlation between published values and the culture people actually experience MIT Sloan, Culture 500
25% Of hybrid and remote employees feel connected to their culture Gartner, 2022
4.5× More likely to be high-performing when culture connectedness is high Gartner, 2024

Does hybrid work damage company culture?

The evidence says no. Bloom, Han and Liang's randomised controlled trial at Trip.com, peer-reviewed in Nature, found hybrid working cut resignations by a third with no loss in performance. Gallup's 2026 data shows hybrid and remote workers are more engaged than remote-capable employees who work entirely on-site. What hybrid does change is the channels that carry culture: corridor conversations, overheard disagreements, the ten minutes before a meeting. Those channels thinned when four in five teams became distributed. The arrangement is not the problem. The absence of a reading is.

Why do new hires struggle with culture in a hybrid workplace?

Microsoft's 2022 Work Trend Index surveyed 31,102 workers across 31 countries and found that employees hired during the pandemic were 47% more likely to consider leaving than pre-pandemic hires. Emanuel, Harrington and Pallais studied software engineers and found that proximity transmits tacit knowledge to junior employees: without it, feedback dropped by 18%. The senior colleague doesn't schedule a meeting to pass on how the team handles disagreements. The new hire overhears it, absorbs the norm. Remove the proximity and the norm doesn't arrive.

This makes sense when you look at how knowledge and norms travel. The senior engineer doesn't schedule a meeting to pass on how the team handles code reviews. The junior engineer overhears a conversation, watches a pull request discussion, absorbs a norm. Remove the proximity and the norm doesn't arrive.

Brucks and Levav ran lab and field experiments and found that video calls generate fewer creative ideas than face-to-face interaction. The screen narrows the visual field and with the visual field, the cognitive field (Brucks and Levav, Nature, 2022). The ideas that used to emerge in the room now need a different route.

AI is changing the conversation too

While hybrid work changed where people sit, AI is changing who people talk to. Microsoft and LinkedIn's 2024 Work Trend Index found that 75% of knowledge workers were using generative AI at work by early 2024 (Microsoft/LinkedIn, 2024). BCG's June 2026 survey of 11,749 workers found that 30% of frontline workers already have AI agents in their daily workflows (BCG, 2026).

The colleague who used to be the first point of contact for a question about process, precedent or "how we handle this" is increasingly not the first point of contact. The AI is. And while Microsoft's own 2026 Work Trend Index, 20,000 workers across 30 countries, found that 67% of the variation in AI's impact sits with organisational factors like culture, managers and talent practices (Microsoft, 2026), most organisations haven't read those organisational factors yet.

"63% of workers expect AI to make the workplace feel less human."

- Resume Now / Pollfish, 2025 (N=1,003)

Resume Now surveyed 1,003 employed adults and found that 63% expect AI to make the workplace feel less human (Resume Now/Pollfish, 2025). Forty-two per cent identified the dehumanisation of work as a primary concern. Tang and colleagues found that heavy AI users report higher loneliness and insomnia (Tang et al., Journal of Applied Psychology, 2023).

But here too, the evidence is more nuanced than the fear. Gallup found that where managers actively champion AI use, trust in agentic AI is 30 points higher (Microsoft, 2026). The AI users in Procter & Gamble's randomised controlled trial reported higher enthusiasm and lower anxiety, not more (Dell'Acqua et al., NBER, 2025). And Interact Software's 2026 analysis found that AI power users spend more of their week socialising, 11% compared with 9% for late adopters (Interact Software, 2026).

AI isn't the enemy of culture. Unmanaged AI adoption is. And unmanaged means: nobody has read what the culture is, so nobody knows what to manage around.

How do managers maintain culture in hybrid teams?

Gartner's research found that 60% of hybrid workers said their direct manager is the single greatest influence on their connection to the organisation's culture. Gallup's data shows managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement, yet managers themselves now experience the lowest engagement of any role. Atlassian studied 1,600 in-person gatherings and found they raised team connection by 27%, but the effect decayed within four months. Rituals raise perceived meaning of work by 16%. They work as part of a system, not as a substitute for reading the culture.

60% Of hybrid workers say the manager is the single greatest influence on culture connection Gartner, 2022
70% Of the variance in team engagement is attributable to the manager Gallup, 2026
27% Uplift in team connection from intentional gatherings, but decays within four months Atlassian, 2024

This places an extraordinary weight on people who were already carrying a great deal. The person carrying the culture has the weakest connection to the culture. And the effect decays: a quarterly offsite wears off before the next one arrives. Without a reading between events, nobody knows whether the connection held.

Kim and colleagues found that group rituals, structured, recurring practices that carry meaning, raise perceived meaning of work by 16% (Kim et al., Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2021). The rituals work. But they work as part of a system, not as a substitute for understanding what the culture actually is.

The question that remains

Gartner surveyed 222 chief human resources officers in late 2025 and found that "culture atrophy" is now a top-four priority (Gartner, 2025). Deloitte's 2026 Human Capital Trends report found that 65% of organisations say their culture needs significant change because of AI (Deloitte, 2026). Forbes HR Council reported in August 2026 that only 21% of employees feel connected to their organisation's culture, and only 20% say their co-workers are committed to the stated values (Forbes/Gallup, 2026).

The awareness is there. The action, in most organisations, is not.

The organisations where hybrid works well and AI lands well share one characteristic: they have read the culture from the people in the culture. Not from a statement on a page. Not from an annual engagement survey with a four-month half-life. From the preferences, habits and norms of the people who carry the culture every day, including the days they work from home.

"The arrangement isn't the problem. The absence of a reading is."

The culture is there. The question is whether anyone has asked what the culture actually is, from the people in the room, the people at home, and the people three time zones away, before the next quarter changes the answer.

Read next: What culture are we mandating? looks at what happened when American CEOs mandated return-to-office for the culture, without defining the culture first. And Whose culture does the customer experience? asks the same question in outsourced delivery, where the culture the customer encounters belongs to the team that answers the call.

Sariio's Culture Blueprint reads an organisation's culture from the people in the organisation, in thirty days. Learn more about the Culture Blueprint →

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