Ways of Working
Reviewed: 2025-10-10
At SERL, we study how software teams actually get work done as remote, hybrid, and large-scale setups become the new normal. Our research maps the diverse spectrum of hybrid arrangements - from policy design to day-to-day coordination. We explore why many offices remain half-empty, what truly attracts people to work on-site, and how hybrid work affects performance, working hours, and time-on-task. Hybrid work isn’t one-size-fits-all. Teams can maintain psychological safety and even reboot pair programming remotely, but only with intentional habits and guardrails. Our studies also surface tensions when “hybrid” means different things to leaders, employees, HR, facilities, and customers. Such misalignments can hinder coordination and delay work outcomes.
At scale, effective delivery depends on balancing autonomy and alignment. This is often supported by decentralized decision-making and lightweight communities of practice, such as guilds. Smooth collaboration relies on trust in boundary artefacts and on making knowledge assets visible and reusable. Governance of code “commons” - ownership and clones - shapes flow and quality.
Large-scale onboarding campaigns and globally distributed hiring benefit from responsiveness to change and structured socialization. Culture still matters: distributed agile teams require local adaptation to overcome cross-site norms. Organizational scaffolding – including socio-technical alignment, team-external coordination, leadership support, and team maturity – is essential to achieving sustainable performance across settings. Architectural decisions and startup legacies shape the boundaries of agile ways of working, while cross-border collaboration raises practical concerns such as tax compliance.
Current and Future Work
We continue to explore evidence-based hybrid policies that align organizational intentions and actual behaviors, with clear on-site value propositions and psychological-safety safeguards. Future directions include richer telemetry on “time on task” vs. hours, and playbooks for decentralized decision-making.
We also focus on increasing retention by improving onboarding, balancing the needs for flexibility and control, and understanding how to preserve employee well-being, and supporting companies in their attempts to maintain and enhance abilities to innovate. Together, this work translates flexible ways of working into sustainable performance by pairing human-centered practices with lightweight, scalable structures that respect the complexity of modern software work.