How to Create and Fine-Tune Your Hybrid Work Policy (+ Template)

There’s more than one way to do hybrid work. Depending on how it’s implemented, hybrid work can support or inhibit productivity, collaboration, engagement, satisfaction, equity, and other business goals. Since the right policy for one organization may not be ideal for another, it’s important to craft your hybrid work policy around your specific resources, people, and desired outcomes.

Your hybrid work policy governs who is eligible for hybrid work and what it looks like at your organization. But it does more than that:  a good policy helps make building occupancy levels manageable and ensures that everyone has access to the resources they need to be effective and happy in the workplace without sacrificing other business needs.

It’s crucial to recognize that sometimes a good policy on paper can become a bad one in practice. A well-intended policy doesn’t always drive the behavior or produce the outcomes you expected—especially if circumstances change after the policy was implemented. Hybrid work policies often need adjustments as you learn more about how employees use the workplace and recognize issues that arise from patterns in behavior.

In this article, we’ll cover how to create a policy that fits your needs and how to make appropriate adjustments to your policy over time. Let’s start with an example policy you can use as a template.

Hybrid work policy template

While you can find examples of actual hybrid work policies online (like Fordham University’s policy for administrators or Microsoft’s lightweight candidate-friendly explanation), these have been designed for specific purposes, and may not translate well to your organization’s context.

We’ve produced a generic example of a hybrid work policy that you can use as a template for your organization’s policy. Depending on your industry, your position on hybrid work, and the factors we’ve covered in this guide, you may want to expand on some points or make other modifications.

[Company Name]’s Hybrid Work Policy

Updated [Date last updated]

We value flexibility and trust our employees to decide where and how they work best. We also recognize that facilitating a hybrid workplace provides numerous benefits to employer and employee alike. At [Company Name], every eligible employee has the option to work from home or another location, so long as they meet the following conditions and adhere to the requirements outlined in this policy.

Hybrid policy overview

Employees must work from the nearest [company name] office at least three days per week. During these days, employees are expected to be in the office for at least eight hours between the hours of 6:00am and 8:00pm. Employees may set their own hours and choose their days in the office, but with the expectation that this schedule will be consistent.

It is each employee’s responsibility to ensure that some of this time in the office each week overlaps with team members, relevant colleagues, and/or supervisors for collaborative work and meetings. If supervisors determine that this isn’t happening, individuals may be switched to a fixed schedule set by the supervisor to ensure this overlap occurs consistently. To streamline this process, employees are required to share their reservation schedule with their supervisor, and encouraged (but not required) to share their reservation schedule with at least one relevant colleague. This can be done from within the calendar app you use to schedule time in the office.

The remaining work days may be remote, with employees working from home, a coworking space, or another suitable location that meets the security criteria established in this policy.

In rare exceptions to this policy, when the nearest [company name] office is not reasonably accessible to an employee, supervisors may request approval for a reduced hybrid schedule that requires less time in the office.

Eligibility for hybrid work

All employees in good standing are eligible for hybrid work if a supervisor determines that their responsibilities can be fulfilled remotely. In general, if the majority of a position’s tasks require a computer, [company name] considers it eligible for hybrid work.

If a supervisor can demonstrate that an employee under their supervision is not performing at standard for their role in terms of productivity or conduct, the privilege of hybrid work may be revoked, and the employee may be required to work from the office full-time until a performance review determines that the issue has been resolved.

Provision of technology and equipment

[Company name] will provide every hybrid employee with a laptop and any software licenses their supervisor determines they need to execute their role. Employees are responsible for acquiring any other resources they need to work remotely. Provided laptops may only be used for work pertaining to [company name], and any work produced on company-issued equipment is the intellectual property of [company name]. At the end of employment, company-issued equipment and its contents are to be returned to [company name].

If company-issued laptops are lost, damaged, or stolen, it is the employee’s responsibility to notify their supervisor immediately so a replacement can be issued promptly. Depending on circumstances, employees may be held responsible for lost or damaged equipment, at the discretion of [company name].

Security

[Company name] employees will sometimes work with customer data and sensitive proprietary information. Hybrid employees are expected to follow the same security protocols when working remotely as they would in the office, but with two additional requirements.

While working remotely, employees must connect to a company-issued VPN to keep their network activity secure. Employees are also responsible for selecting and maintaining secure environments for remote work, where they have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Failure to follow these guidelines may result in forfeiture of remote working privileges.

Further information

If employees have questions or concerns about this policy, its fairness, or their unique circumstances, they may contact their assigned supervisor or the human resources department. [Insert best general contact information for HR.]

How to create a hybrid work policy

Creating your policy requires you to weigh your intentions and aspirations against parameters which may be less flexible, like the amount of space and desks you have available. Ultimately, it should define an achievable vision for your work model, outlining:

• Eligibility criteria for hybrid work
• Employee schedules
• Employee workspaces
• Equipment responsibilities
• Performance and availability expectations

Your organization’s requirements for eligibility, availability, equipment, remote work environments, and accountability are the “nuts and bolts” of your hybrid policy, but there are several considerations you should have in mind before you get there. Since your policy directly impacts your space utilization and employee satisfaction, it should be crafted with your real estate and engagement goals in mind.

It’s also worth recognizing that other than the limitations of your space, resources, and types of work, there could be a wide range of hybrid work policies that would be fine for your organization’s purposes. Within your industry, you’re bound to find companies with policies that look completely different from your own.

We’ll walk you through the process of creating a hybrid work policy tailored to your organization.

1. Prioritize your goals

You may have several organizational goals that could serve as a starting point for creating your hybrid work policy. Real estate goals, cultural goals, and leadership expectations can all guide the process, and as you consider their implications and the full range of factors, you may need to adjust these goals to strike the right balance. Generally, you can select a goal and begin working backward to determine the schedule and space you’d need to accomplish it.

Suppose you want to reduce your footprint by 20 percent without reducing space per workstation, and hybrid work is a key component of your strategy to downsize offices or consolidate locations. You’d simply adjust the ratio of employees per workstation until you have enough extra workstations to free up the desired square footage. This ratio would then guide your process of creating a hybrid work schedule that enables employees to comfortably share the available pool of desks.

Alternatively, you may want to start with a cultural goal. Maybe your organization wants employees to have full autonomy over where and how they work, reflecting your trust in everyone to determine how they work most effectively. Or perhaps your CEO expects everyone to be in the office a set number of days, emphasizing the importance of collaboration, visibility, engagement, innovation, or face-to-face connections.

If employee satisfaction is an organizational priority, you’ll want to consider how your policy will shape the way employees feel about work—and that will depend on your particular employee population. While in general, employees favor autonomy and flexibility, most still see value in working in the office, and some prefer it. An employee survey shouldn’t necessarily define your hybrid work policy, but it can help you avoid making assumptions about what schedule and policies will make your particular employees happier in the workplace.

Once you’ve determined the goals that are most important and considered how they’ll impact your policy, it’s time to look at what’s actually possible with the space you have available.

2. Evaluate your capacity

The more days your hybrid work policy requires people to work in the office the more space you need. More days in the office means higher occupancy levels, and while you can adjust your office space density by adding or removing workstations or changing the office-to-workstation ratio, every office has capacity limits that will affect what your hybrid policy can look like.

If you don’t have enough capacity to comfortably facilitate the number of in-office days you want your policy to require, then you either need to acquire more space or decrease the required days in the office. However, through occupancy analytics, many office-based organizations are discovering that they also have underutilized space which they can repurpose to increase capacity. If few people are using an amenity or meeting area, you may be able to avoid acquiring additional square footage by converting this space into more workstations.

As you define your hybrid work policy, it’s essential that you understand the relationship between your policy and your capacity, and that you explore the ways that your current space can meet the needs of your policy. Ideally, you’ll want to test potential scenarios to find your best option.

This is where a predictive analytics solution like Tango Portfolio Strategy can be especially helpful. At a high level, you can investigate how policy changes would impact available space across your portfolio or at individual locations, or examine how your capacity should guide your policy. On a more granular level, if you want to test configurations for a specific office, Tango Space’s scenario planning capabilities can help you find the optimal layout that fits the parameters of your desired hybrid work policy.

In general, you should aim to create a hybrid work policy that keeps average occupancy levels around 70–80 percent. This should allow peak occupancy levels to stay below your capacity and ensure that people can comfortably access the resources they need to be effective. However, you’ll want to pay attention to the capacity and occupancy levels of particular types of space as well, such as meeting rooms.

3. Choose a hybrid work schedule

While your goals or capacity may determine the number of days people are required to work in the office or the degree of flexibility they have, your hybrid work schedule formalizes employee expectations and establishes who needs to be in the office and when.

There are three main types of hybrid work schedules: fully flexible, fixed-hybrid, and team-dependent.

Fully flexible schedule

A fully flexible schedule gives employees complete autonomy to select which days and/or times they come into the office. In some cases, employees may also have the freedom to choose how many days they work from the office, but even if an employer requires a specific number of days, giving the employee control over when they work in which location makes the schedule “fully flexible.”

This model often has the most positive impact on employee satisfaction and engagement, but it also makes space utilization less predictable, and can create challenges with collaboration. It’s harder to tell who will be in on which days and whether you have sufficient space. And that makes it more crucial that your organization has a robust desk booking system and a comprehensive occupancy analytics solution. If you don’t have these tools, this schedule will probably be too chaotic to manage effectively.

Fixed-hybrid schedule

In a fixed-hybrid schedule, the employer explicitly defines how many days employees work in the office and which days and/or times they’re required to be there. This makes it easier to plan for collaboration and distribute space utilization, but it offers employees less autonomy and may not work best for individual teams or particular projects.

If your focus is on keeping occupancy levels within a range, or you have real estate goals to reduce office space, a fixed-hybrid schedule gives you more control over the amount of space you need, but it can come at the cost of lower employee satisfaction.

Team-dependent schedule

A team-dependent or cohort-based schedule lets managers or supervisors decide who needs to be in the office when. This enables teams to coordinate time in the office while still having the flexibility to decide what works best for them, but it can also create perceptions of unfairness if different teams have varying levels of flexibility, and it can feel like departments and locations essentially have different hybrid work policies.

This schedule makes most sense if you want to emphasize collaboration, as the schedule encourages planning time in the office around teams or other relevant groupings.

4. Define expectations for eligibility, availability, equipment, environment, and accountability

When employees read your hybrid work policy, they should come away with a clear understanding of how it applies to them, and what hybrid work looks like at your organization.

Your policy should define what conditions make someone eligible for hybrid work, such as their role, physical distance from the nearest office, extenuating circumstances, or time at the company, and if necessary, who can approve someone’s eligibility for hybrid work. It should also clearly explain what equipment and type of environment is required, as well as which party (employer or employee) is responsible for providing these needs.

Can employees work from anywhere with internet access? Will you provide access to a coworking space (or a stipend for using one)?

It should also be clear how available you expect employees to be when they work remotely. Depending on the industry and company culture, it may be important for employees to be available for spontaneous calls. Or perhaps timely communication is less crucial or common, and it’s fine to reply to emails and messages hours after they’re received.

Your policy also needs to establish security protocols and procedures, particularly for industries and positions that involve working with sensitive data or handling proprietary information. You may want to require employees to use a VPN, a particular password manager, and specific software, with clear guidelines for coordinating with IT to use additional solutions.

Finally, your hybrid work policy should explain your accountability structure, including any tools you will be using to monitor employee activity, such as tracking software or badge scanning. What corrective actions will you take if the policy isn’t followed? What accommodations will you allow for special circumstances? (And what are those circumstances?)

Your policy should aim to pre-emptively address questions and clarify what your expectations are for hybrid workers, so everyone is on the same page and knows where to turn when there’s uncertainty.

Now let’s discuss how to tell when it’s time for your hybrid work policy to change.

Signs you need to adjust your hybrid work policy

Your hybrid work policy may seem perfect now, but you won’t know if it will meet your needs until after you roll it out. You have to see what happens when employees follow it—and how well they follow it. With any hybrid workplace model, it’s essential to monitor how your workplace is being used and how employees feel about the flexibility, productivity, and collaboration it facilitates.

Occupancy levels are too high

As occupancy levels rise, buildings become more congested, and shared office resources become more difficult to access. Particular meeting rooms may be extremely difficult to reserve. It might be challenging to find workstations near teammates. And employees may feel like they don’t have what they need to make their time in the office productive.

JLL’s Global Occupancy Benchmarking Report 2025 indicates that the global average utilization rate (the average occupancy level) of office buildings is 54 percent, with an average target rate of 79 percent. This rate varies by region and industry, but as you track utilization data in your space management or occupancy analytics solution, it helps to see your metrics in comparison to a typical office. You’ll also want to keep tabs on how employees feel about the workplace with periodic surveys. We recommend surveying employees four weeks after introducing or modifying your hybrid work policy to gauge their ability to access meeting rooms, workstations, restrooms, amenities, and other shared office resources.

When an entire location’s occupancy level is too high, that may mean you need to reduce the number of required days in the office, adjust who is required to be in on which days, or find additional space.

But if the problem is isolated to particular types of space, lowering occupancy levels may require you to repurpose some underutilized space or assign space to different departments or teams. Depending on your reservation system, you may also be able to limit who can reserve which spaces, redistributing occupancy levels to less popular spaces. If those aren’t options for you, however, you may need to adjust to a fixed-hybrid policy that rebalances the days and times people are in the office.

Vacancy levels are too high

Similarly, you’ll want to consider the impact your hybrid work policy is having on vacancy levels. Vacancy is the inverse of occupancy, representing the amount of space that’s unoccupied. When vacancy levels are high, it’s likely an indicator that your space is underutilized. For some organizations, underutilization is a signal that there are opportunities to downsize or reconfigure an office to accommodate growth or other goals.

But perhaps you simply overestimated how often people would be using the office, or how many people would work in the office at once. If you want to ensure your space is well utilized, high vacancy levels could mean it’s time to require more days in the office, enforce your policy more strictly, or add accountability measures to ensure people are actually using the office as intended.

Employee satisfaction is too low

Employee satisfaction may not be the impetus behind every workplace decision, but it should certainly be a consideration. Your hybrid work policy doesn’t have to improve satisfaction, but if it’s creating friction and causing discord, you may want to reconsider the level of flexibility your policy offers or modify it to foster a more collaborative environment.

Hybrid workplaces are often intended to be agile. By nature, they involve a shifting pool of occupants throughout the workweek, which means the way the office is used will naturally change from day to day. So it’s important to regularly conduct employee surveys to see whether your policy is meeting everyone’s needs, and then explore whether you need to make adjustments to keep everyone happy with the workplace.

The policy no longer aligns with business goals

Your hybrid work policy should be rooted in your organization’s vision and goals. But as leadership changes, markets shift, or opportunities arise, your policy may create conflict with new goals and plans.

Perhaps as you get closer to a product launch or respond to an emerging problem in your industry, your hybrid policy is inhibiting the level of collaboration you need to keep up. Or maybe reducing your operating costs has become a new executive’s entire focus, and you need to reduce the number of days people are in the office so you can consolidate and downsize locations.

When your circumstances change, your hybrid policy may need to change as well.

Perfect your hybrid work policy with Tango Workplace

If you want your hybrid work policy to fit your organization’s needs, you need to understand how your space is being used and have the tools to predict how decisions will affect your workplace. Tango Workplace leverages your workplace infrastructure and occupancy tracking technologies to help you see where each office is over- or underutilized, and specialized predictive analytics and scenario planning capabilities enable you to test the outcomes of changes at the portfolio or location level—so instead of guessing the results of your policy, you can know which options will get the results you need.

Want to see how it works? Learn more about Tango Workplace, or request a demo today