The debate around hybrid work has reached a curious inflection point. While boardrooms across Germany increasingly mandate a return to the office, the executives who actually live and breathe this model tell a more nuanced story. To cut through the noise, we surveyed leaders from a broad range of industries. What emerged challenges some of the most widely held assumptions on both sides of the argument.

Hybrid Work Is No Longer an Experiment

Start with the baseline: hybrid work is not a transitional arrangement. The majority of respondents have been operating in a hybrid model for more than three years. Structures are in place, routines are established, and for most executives, the model functions. 59% still use the office as their primary place of work, spending 40% or less of their time at home. The direction of travel, however, is clear. This is structural, not situational.

What makes this particularly significant is the timing. Even as a growing number of organisations pull people back to the office, the executives we surveyed are not just tolerating hybrid work. They are largely satisfied with it. Over 90% report being satisfied or very satisfied with their current work situation. That is not a signal to dismiss lightly.

The Productivity Paradox

This is where the data gets genuinely interesting, and where the conversation demands more intellectual honesty.

When asked to rate their productivity at home, executives consistently score concentration significantly higher in the home office than in the office. Yet quality of work is rated as good or very good by 90% when working from home and 92% in the office. A difference so marginal it is essentially noise. Efficiency and creativity follow a similar pattern of near-equivalence.

The task allocation data reinforces this picture. Executives strongly prefer the home office for deep work, writing, data analysis, and online meetings. The office earns its place for creative collaboration, project planning, and the informal exchanges that no digital tool has successfully replicated.

This tells us that the productivity question is not binary. The real value lever is task-environment alignment: deploying each setting for what it does best, rather than insisting on a one-size-fits-all presence policy.

The Hidden Cost of Working From Home

The advantages of remote work are well understood. No commute ranks first by a significant margin, followed by flexible time management and improved work-life balance. These are not trivial benefits. They represent real, daily quality-of-life gains that directly affect talent retention.

The data also surfaces a set of challenges that deserve more leadership attention than they typically receive. 46% of respondents report working longer hours from home. One third struggle to maintain a meaningful separation between work and personal life. Feelings of isolation, difficulty maintaining break routines, and ergonomic issues are all material concerns.

The deeper risk is subtle. Executives may be reporting high satisfaction precisely because they are absorbing these costs personally, working harder and longer to compensate for the structural friction of remote collaboration. That is not a sustainable operating model, and it is not what HR leaders should mistake for a healthy work culture.

The Belonging Problem

Perhaps the most strategically consequential finding in this survey is the relationship between physical presence and organisational belonging. 76% of respondents say the office atmosphere is important or very important to their sense of belonging. Only 6% consider it largely irrelevant.

Yet when asked whether their sense of connection to the company has changed as a result of working from home, the majority report it as unchanged, with a meaningful minority noting a weakening of that connection. This is not a contradiction. It is a warning signal. Belonging is often invisible until it erodes. The executives who feel their connection has weakened are unlikely to be the ones most vocally raising the issue in leadership meetings.

For HR leaders, this points to a clear strategic priority: the office must be intentionally designed to deliver the social and cultural capital that justifies the commute. Modern workspaces, quiet zones for focused work, and structured team activities are the top three changes executives say would increase their willingness to come in more often. These are not comfort upgrades. They are investments in organisational cohesion.

The Tuesday to Thursday Problem

One of the most operationally significant findings, and one that rarely surfaces in hybrid work commentary, is the strong clustering of preferred office days. The overwhelming majority of executives prefer to be in the office from Tuesday to Thursday. Monday and Friday have effectively become extension days of the weekend.

The implications are twofold. First, any organisation hoping to reduce its real estate footprint on the back of hybrid work faces a structural barrier: if nearly all staff converge on the same three days, space utilisation does not improve. It simply shifts the bottleneck. Second, the cultural rhythm of the working week has fundamentally changed. Leaders designing hybrid frameworks need to work with this reality, not against it.

Leading at a Distance: The Capability Gap

The survey's findings on leadership are where the tension between individual experience and organisational reality is sharpest.

Almost 30% of executives rate leading remote teams as rather difficult. 25% acknowledge they are only partly able to adequately support their people when working from home. Viewed from the other direction, more than a quarter of employees feel insufficiently supported by their managers in a remote setting.

Informal communication is the clearest casualty. 85% of executives have spontaneous conversations with colleagues on a daily basis when in the office. That figure collapses to roughly 40% having such exchanges only rarely or never when working from home. This is not merely a social loss. It is an intelligence loss. The corridor conversations that surface early signals, build trust, and align teams informally are not being replaced by structured digital check-ins.

77% of surveyed executives identify weakening company culture as the greatest organisational risk of widespread home working. 63% cite declining innovation as a direct consequence of reduced interaction. These are not abstract concerns. They are the foundations of long-term competitive advantage.

What This Means for HR Leaders

The picture that emerges from this data is not a vindication of either camp in the return-to-office debate. It is an argument for strategic intentionality.

Hybrid work delivers genuine individual value in autonomy, wellbeing, and focus. It also creates real organisational risk in culture, innovation, leadership effectiveness, and the informal connective tissue that holds teams together. The organisations that navigate this most effectively will treat the office not as a default setting to be defended, but as a deliberately designed environment that earns presence by delivering what remote work cannot.

That requires HR leaders who understand both the human and commercial dimensions of this trade-off, and who are willing to challenge convenient narratives on both sides.