For companies that are considering a distributed workforce: a hybrid model where some people are in the office and others are at home is much harder.

People in the office will likely be having conversations & ve making decisions that the others are not part of.

Going fully distributed will force you to think about communication processes. A hybrid model done improperly will only force you to think about how to include those who are not at the HQ offices.

The pandemic has been a great equalizer for distributed offices & WFH employees.

When everyone is on zoom, everyone gets the same square video window.

When you are on zoom, but the others are in a meeting room, participating in the discussion becomes harder. Your audio is delayed, it's harder to read & convey body language etc.

Buffer has some great posts about going fully distributed as a company https://open.buffer.com/remote-work/ 

If you do have a hybrid model, one thing that somewhat worked for us at Uber was making sure that the distributed/remote team had something they completely owned

If remote employees are part of an HQ team, they risk becoming just additional resources, not part of decision making

Another thing to consider is reporting lines. Nothing can be more frustrating than if your manager is on the other side of the world and it’s hard to schedule a meeting.

There will be a need for cross time-zone reporting lines somewhere, but optimize for local support.