Abstract
When hybrid work is adopted, organizations must enable coordination and connection across teams that have diverse configurations and needs. We extend prior work that largely studied distributed work at the team level, to explore how organizations manage diverse hybrid configurations simultaneously. Through a nine-month qualitative case study of Tech Co, a global technology firm that implemented a fully flexible hybrid policy, we identify a set of deliberate organizational practices that functioned as flexible scaffolding for hybrid work. Further, we found that these practices were customized by teams through corresponding emergent practices. Together, the deliberate organizational and the emergent team practices formed a dynamic system that enabled coordination and connection. Our study contributes to theories of hybrid work, local adaptation, and organizational learning. We challenge the assumption that hybrid work requires standardization to be effective and instead theorize how organizations can embrace structural and actor-level variation through adaptable systems that shape to their context.