Few workplace topics get people as worked up as where they’re expected to sit. Big companies have spent the last couple of years announcing return-to-office mandates, walking some of them back, and then announcing them again. For small teams, the question is a bit different. You don’t have a property portfolio to justify or thousands of staff to coordinate. You just want a setup that keeps good people around and gets the work done.
So what do people actually want, and what tends to work for a team of five, fifteen or fifty?
Where things stand in the UK
Hybrid working has settled in as a normal part of working life rather than a pandemic hangover. According to the Office for National Statistics’ most recent look at who has access to hybrid working, around 28% of working adults in Great Britain were splitting their time between home and a workplace in early 2025, and that share has been creeping up since 2022.
The headline figure hides some big differences, though. Hybrid working is far more common among higher earners. The ONS found that 45% of people earning £50,000 or more worked hybrid, compared with just 8% of those on under £20,000. People in their 30s and 40s were also much more likely to work this way than people in their late teens and twenties. In practice, a lot of this comes down to the type of job. It’s hard to stack shelves or fix a boiler from your kitchen table.
What employees say they want
When people do have the option, most of them value it a lot. Research from the CIPD, the professional body for HR, found that around 1.1 million UK workers had changed jobs because of a lack of flexibility. Younger workers were the most likely to have done so. The same research found that 80% of workers said flexible working had improved their quality of life.
At the same time, more than half of employees told the CIPD they felt pressure to spend more time in the office, mostly coming from senior leadership. That gap between what staff want and what leaders want is where a lot of the tension sits.
The case for each option
Fully in the office
There are real advantages to everyone being in the same room. New starters pick things up faster when they can overhear how experienced colleagues handle problems. Quick questions get answered in seconds rather than sitting in a chat window. Some people simply work better with a clear line between home and work, especially if they don’t have a decent space to work from at home.
The downsides are the commute, the cost of the office itself, and a much smaller pool of people you can hire from. For a small business outside a big city, that last one can matter a lot.
Fully remote
Going fully remote opens up hiring to anyone in the country, or further. It saves on rent and gives staff back hours they’d otherwise spend travelling. Plenty of small agencies, software firms and online businesses have run this way successfully for years.
It does take more deliberate effort, though. Communication needs to be written down and clear, onboarding needs proper planning, and it’s easier for people to feel isolated or for small problems to go unnoticed. Remote teams that work well usually meet up in person every so often, even if it’s only a few times a year.
For what it’s worth, this is how we work at pipdig. Everyone on the team is fully remote, and it works really well for us. It means we can work with good people wherever they happen to live, and nobody loses time to a commute. The trade-off is that we have to be quite disciplined about communication, keeping things written down and making sure nobody is left out of decisions. For the kind of work we do, that’s been well worth it.
Hybrid
Hybrid is the compromise most teams land on, and for good reason. People get focused time at home and face-to-face time with colleagues. The CIPD found the most common pattern among organisations with a minimum requirement was three days a week in the office.
The catch is that hybrid can end up giving you the worst of both if it isn’t organised. Turning up to an office to sit on video calls with colleagues who stayed at home is a common complaint. Hybrid works best when office days are coordinated, so the people who need to collaborate are actually there at the same time.
Why small teams have an advantage
Large companies tend to need one policy that applies to thousands of people. Small teams can be much more flexible and pragmatic about it. A few things that tend to work well:
- Agree anchor days. Pick one or two days a week when everyone is in, and keep meetings, planning and social stuff for those days. Leave the rest flexible.
- Decide based on the work, not the principle. Some roles genuinely need to be on site. Others don’t. It’s fine to treat them differently as long as the reasoning is clear and fair.
- Write things down. Whatever the setup, decisions that only get made in passing conversations will leave somebody out eventually.
- Ask your team. With a small group you can actually have the conversation, rather than guessing from national surveys. People are much more likely to stick to an arrangement they had a say in.
- Review it. What suits a team of six might not suit a team of twenty. Revisit the setup every so often rather than treating it as fixed for ever.
It’s also worth remembering that employees in the UK have the right to request flexible working, and the rules around it have been getting more supportive of staff over the last few years. Having a clear, sensible approach in place makes those conversations a lot easier for everyone.
So which is best?
Honestly, there isn’t a single right answer, and anyone who tells you there is probably has something to sell. The data suggests most people who can work hybrid want to keep doing so, and that a lack of flexibility does cost employers staff. But the best setup for any particular team depends on the work, the people and where they live.
We’re fully remote and wouldn’t change it, but we know that won’t suit every business. For a lot of small teams, a lightly structured hybrid approach with a couple of shared office days is a sensible starting point. Its flexible enough to keep people happy, but structured enough that the team still feels like a team. The important thing is to choose it on purpose, talk to your staff about it, and be willing to adjust it as you grow rather than just drifting into whatever happend to stick in 2020.
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