A behavioral scientist breaks down what companies should weigh when designing their own hybrid schedules
The Bank of America's decision to stop hybrid employees from working two remote days in a row solved a scheduling problem. It spread attendance more evenly across the week and eased pressure on the bank's office space, according to HRD America's earlier coverage of the policy change. But according to one behavioral scientist, that doesn't necessarily mean the right people are showing up on the same days.
A Bank of America spokesperson told Banking Dive that spreading out remote days is meant to support in-person collaboration, saying employees' ability to work together drives the best outcomes for customers, clients and teammates.
Whether the Bank of America's rule actually delivers on that collaboration promise is a separate question, according to Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, a behavioral scientist and CEO of the Columbus, Ohio-based consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. He said most hybrid policies confuse two different goals: getting more people into the building, and getting the right people into the building at the same time. Only the second one, he argued, makes the commute worth it.
The point of the office is overlap
Tsipursky started with a basic question about what an in-person day actually needs to accomplish.
"The only reason to come to the office for the vast majority of people is to work in person with their colleagues," Tsipursky said. "Otherwise, you can stay home and not waste time commuting."
Most employees, he said, would actually get more done working alone at home. In his view, that leaves the office worth the trip for only a few things, working with colleagues, socializing, and building trust.
Does the Bank of America's fix solve the right problem?
The Bank of America's new rule doesn't ask whether the right colleagues are showing up together. It only asks whether employees are avoiding two remote days in a row, which could just spread the same headcount more evenly across the week without putting collaborators in the room at the same time.
"If the wrong people are in the office, then that's not going to help you if you're not having the people who collaborate with you in the office," Tsipursky said.
What matters isn't which days a policy assigns, he said, but whether the people who need each other are there at the same time.
"The key is, are your team members in the office at the same time?" he said. "Do you have things you can collaborate on, or are you just passing each other like ships in the night, working on your individual tasks with your headphones plugged in? That doesn't help anyone, because you can do that at home without having driven an hour to work and an hour back."
Why company-wide mandates miss the mark
Tsipursky's overlap standard also complicates the Bank of America's own stated rationale for the change. The bank has said the new rule is meant to ease midweek office overcrowding on Tuesdays through Thursdays by pushing attendance toward emptier Mondays and Fridays.
Tsipursky argued that spreading attendance across underused days like Monday and Friday can undercut the case for keeping the office open on those days at all.
"If you can get alignment so everyone agrees not to come in on those days, you can simply shut down the office," he said. "You save on costs, and you're much more likely to have team members together on the days when they do come in."
Real estate utilization factored in as well.
"If you're trying to justify to your investors and the board why you have certain office buildings, that's not really a company bottom-line goal," he said. "It's not actually beneficial for the company."
His point lines up with research HRD America has reported on separately, showing how hybrid coordination failures can cost a mid-sized company millions annually.
Rethinking who sets the schedule
Tsipursky's recommendation still involves a set schedule, just one built by the team using it rather than handed down from leadership.
"The best approach is trusting individual teams to figure out the schedule that works best for them, with the goal of ensuring collaboration and trust building," he said.
Few employers actually do this, and Tsipursky pointed to convenience rather than evidence as the reason why.
"It takes a little less effort than coordinating with team members and having team members coordinate with each other," he said. "You can just say we're going to come in on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. It's a company-wide policy. And yes, it creates friction. It causes problems for people. It undermines their quality of life. But it's less headache for leaders who don't have to coordinate."
He described a hybrid model that combines a shared anchor day with local flexibility.
"If you want to ensure that people can coordinate across departments, you can have one day when everyone comes in," he said. "Let's say Wednesday would be the day for everyone, and then all the teams can pick one other day or two other days when they come in, and that's fine."
Different functions, he added, need different rhythms entirely. Accountants, he said, don't need much in-person time most weeks, but coordinating closely matters at the end of the month, when they're closing the books.
"When you have computer developers, they benefit most from being together at the beginning of a sprint, collaborating and brainstorming, and again at the end of a sprint," he said. "In the weeks in between, they can most effectively spend their time at home."
That kind of flexibility also has real retention implications. A randomized controlled trial published by Stanford's Institute for Economic Policy Research found hybrid arrangements cut resignations by a third without hurting performance.
Additionally, Gallup's most recent hybrid work research found a similar pattern. Ninety-one percent of employees whose teams set the schedule call it fair, the same rate as those who set their own hours and well above the 73% who say so when leadership decides alone. Employees on fully self-directed schedules are also 76% more likely to name burnout as their top challenge than those on team-set schedules. Gallup's analysis linked those team-set norms to higher productivity and lower anxiety.
For Tsipursky, though, it comes down to something simpler than survey data.
"The policy that many companies are pursuing results in harming quality of life and causing burnout for their team members," he said. "If you care about quality of life and addressing burnout, you definitely don't want to force people to commute when they don't have to."
The Bank of America said its policy is meant to solve midweek overcrowding and real estate utilization. Whether it also produces more meaningful collaboration is a separate matter, and in Tsipursky's view, that still hinges on the people scheduled into the office on any given day, not simply how many of them show up.
