Jessica Malnik On Why Hybrid Work Is The Hardest

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Hybrid work is usually presented as the sensible middle. You get some of the flexibility of remote and some of the cohesion of an office, and everyone compromises a little. Jessica Malnik thinks that framing has it backwards.

She runs a consultancy helping B2B and tech companies differentiate in a noisy market, and for nearly six years has also run The Remote Work Tribe — a media site, podcast and newsletter for founders, operations leaders and marketing leaders trying to lead distributed teams. On Unscripted Small Business, host Jeremy Rivera asked for her hot take. She was not sure it still qualified as one.

Hybrid Is Harder Than Fully Remote Or Fully In-Office

“I’m not really sure it’s a hot take anymore because I think a lot of people are starting to realize it — the whole play that hybrid work is the best compromise. I would actually argue hybrid work is even harder than in-person in office or fully remote, because you’re basically combining all of the hard parts of in office and all of the hard parts of remote into one thing.” — Jessica Malnik

The argument is structural rather than cultural. A fully remote company is forced to solve remote problems — it has no choice but to write things down, because there is no corridor in which the decision could have been made. A fully in-office company never has to solve them at all. A hybrid company gets the remote problems without the forcing function that makes anyone fix them, because there is always a room where the real conversation could happen.

She names the specific failure that produces:

“So it’s really, really common to end up with basically a company of second class citizens, where you have the people who are predominantly remote and you have people in the office all the time, and suddenly the ones who are remote don’t even feel included.” — Jessica Malnik

“Predominantly remote” is the phrase to notice. This is not about a fully distributed team. It is about the minority in a mixed arrangement, which is the group hybrid policies almost never account for, because policy is written by people who are in the room.

The Meeting Problems Nobody Solves

Jeremy offered a case study against himself: a team split across coasts that ended up “basically living in the meeting six hours a day,” working through everything that needed doing inside the call, with people idling in the background while one person did three-quarters of the work.

Jessica’s response is unusually honest about the limits of the fix:

“I don’t know how to tackle it other than I find that at least companies that tend to skew a little bit heavier async first, everything kind of written down — even if they have a heavy meeting culture — if they kind of skew to everything where it’s like, hey, let’s document it, let’s have agendas for every meeting, let’s make sure that we’re showcasing any sort of decisions that have been made within Slack or within an internal wiki or within a project management tool or even email, that can kind of start to at least make it so you have essentially less people in every call.” — Jessica Malnik

And then the part most consultants would edit out: “But I’ve never seen a company where you’ve been able to fully get rid of that.”

That is the realistic target. Not the elimination of meetings, which nobody has achieved, but fewer people in each one — achieved by making the written record good enough that attendance stops being the only way to stay informed.

Commodity Content And The Copycat Problem

The same principle shows up in her content work, and the connection is not accidental — both are about what only your organisation knows.

“If basically an LLM or even someone who is not a subject matter expert can write the exact same piece of content — that’s this commodity 10x copycat content. Now it can be 1,000X copycat content because anyone can do that. So you really want to be thinking about what are the things that only we want to be known for that we can add to the conversation. Whether it is original research, whether it is getting quotes…” — Jessica Malnik

The test she offers is refreshingly cheap to run: could a competent non-expert, or a model, produce this exact article? If yes, it is commodity output and the volume advantage now belongs to whoever is willing to generate the most of it — a race with no finish line and no prize.

She also insists on defining the job before the format: is this piece meant to be found by a model, or is it meant to convert? “That’s a different strategy… what is kind of the main goals behind all of that? First and foremost, and then scale up from there.”

What Small Teams Should Standardise First

Her diagnosis of where documentation debt begins is specific, and it is later than most people expect:

“One of the biggest problems I see over and over again is just like not having a culture of documentation from the start. And that creates all kinds — and that’s fine when you’re under ten people, like you can get surprisingly far. However, then you start adding kind of in maybe that first tier of like middle manager types. And you have a whole bunch of people in a whole bunch of different departments all doing their own thing and no one…” — Jessica Malnik

Under ten people, the shared context lives in everyone’s head and that genuinely works. The break happens at the first management layer, because that is the point at which no single person is in every conversation any more. The trap is that nothing feels broken on the day it breaks — the cost appears months later as duplicated work and decisions nobody can explain.

She has a modern version of the same problem, too. On AI-assisted building: “what happens when that one person gets promoted or they leave for another job? Who’s managing the vibe-coded CRM, or the vibe-coded internal tool that was done by one person? If that’s not somewhere in your documentation, you don’t have Looms, you don’t have something in there so that everyone knows all the edge cases — that tool’s going to break super fast. And now you’re suddenly just spinning in circles, but a lot faster.”

“Spinning in circles, but a lot faster” is as good a one-line summary of the risk of internal AI tooling as we have heard.

Documentation As The Actual Fix

The thread joining all of it is that hybrid, meetings and AI tooling are the same problem wearing different clothes: knowledge that exists in one person’s head, in one room, or in one unmaintained tool.

Jessica also notes a pattern about who drives documentation initiatives — typically one person, “usually a founder, sometimes a co-founder, sometimes a key operations manager or general manager type.” And when that person leaves, or the documentation “wasn’t super clear or wasn’t fully enforced,” somebody new takes over, which is when companies cycle into their next project management tool. She is sceptical that the cycle can be escaped entirely: most companies, “for better or worse, do cycle in and out of different tools every few years.”

Which suggests the durable investment is not the tool. It is the habit of recording decisions somewhere — a wiki, Slack, a project tool, email — that survives whichever tool wins this cycle.

Connect With Jessica Malnik

The fastest route, in her words, is theremoteworktribe.com — or the newsletter directly, which goes out about twice a month covering remote and hybrid leadership, AI, marketing, positioning, and the communication side: “how do you manage, how do you hire in the age of AI, how do you train people up.”

More on the systems side of running a small team in the SOP library and the clarity one-pager SOP.