Hybrid and remote work are here to stay in many organizations. They have their positives, expanding what’s possible for teams in terms of flexibility, autonomy, and access to talent. For many employees, working in such teams has opened new possibilities for their careers and their comfort at work.

Nevertheless, they have also introduced new kinds of complexity that many organizations still underestimate—and, crucially, that many managers continue to struggle with. Even the most committed teams can feel that small misunderstandings happen more often, decisions take a little longer, and alignment is harder to maintain and easier to lose.

It’s tempting to explain these challenges in simple ways—the inevitable effects of distance and not being face-to-face, for example, or even a supposed lack of effort: the idea that employees without frequent in-person contact aren’t communicating enough or collaborating the way they “should.”

But from our experience and research at Uptimize, the reality is that something deeper is happening. Working within hybrid team structures can expose and amplify the cognitive differences that have always existed inside teams—the ways people absorb information, communicate, solve problems, and respond to change. These variations are not new, and ignorance of cognitive diversity has impeded many in-person teams and projects as well. In hybrid contexts, they can simply be harder to appreciate and leverage. This appears to be a principal reason why hybrid teams can struggle—and why managers today play an outsize role in keeping their teams connected and resilient.

Hybrid work creates a reality in which teammates no longer share the same space, the same rhythm, or the same level of context. One person may start their day in a quiet home office, another may begin after a long........

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