By Thomas Hanssen, CEO of CfL. Opinion piece originally published in Finans, September 16, 2025.
If there’s one agenda that has filled auditoriums and sparked heated debates among CfL’s member organizations, it’s hybrid work. Primarily in the form of working from home, but also in variants like the four-day work week.
The divide is clear: on one side, those who view hybrid work as the path to flexibility, well-being, and higher productivity. On the other, those who fear it undermines collaboration, organizational culture, and the company’s ability to deliver results.
Critics also point out that remote work risks blurring the boundaries between professional and private life.
Over the past year, several large companies have put an end to working from home. With Novo Nordisk’s announcement that office employees will, as a rule, be required to show up five days a week, the debate has flared up once again.
It may seem like a controversial move, but perhaps this is exactly the moment to ask: Is remote work a strategic luxury or a cultural dead end? Has it created more fuss than force?
My answer is that the extent of remote work must be determined solely by the company’s strategy. In challenging times, it is entirely legitimate for a top management team to want to bring the organization closer together – physically as well.
At CfL, we draw on organizational researcher Peter Holdt Christensen, who emphasizes that hybrid work has become an extreme form of individualization, where the focus has shifted from community and task to individual preferences.
He points out that hybrid work is often understood as a matter of how many days people want to work from home and how they prefer to structure their tasks. In reality, however, it must always be seen as a balancing act between three considerations: the individual, the task, and the community.
It is leadership’s responsibility to actively weigh these three considerations. Novo’s announcement is therefore a call for leaders to take their leadership responsibility seriously: to enter the dilemmas, not retreat to a default policy on remote work. Of course, there must be room for flexibility and for employees with different needs – also at Novo – but never at the expense of strategy.
Hybrid work has created a new kind of distance—and with it, imbalance. When we say yes to working from home for the sake of focus, we risk losing coordination and community. What may sound modern and inclusive at first glance can, in reality, undermine the very foundation of how workplaces function.
When everyone optimizes for themselves, we lose the collective. This is a classic social dilemma that leaders must dare to confront.
A strong culture is not something you write down; it is something you share in human encounters: in the lunch break, in the quick question at the coffee machine, in the joint celebration of a success. All the things that rarely happen in a Teams room.
Strategy also requires presence. Execution is about more than PowerPoints and KPIs—it requires interaction, trust, and a shared direction.
Therefore, the extent of remote work should not be determined by individual wishes (media debates or generational preferences) but by the company’s strategy. If the strategy requires close collaboration, rapid coordination, and a strong culture, physical presence is not just desirable but necessary. This is not about mistrust of performance or productivity—it is about purpose.
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We know that many companies struggle with the risk of creating A- and B-teams, and it can be tempting to dismiss remote work as a luxury experiment for the creative class. Of course, that’s an oversimplification, since employees in the same workplace often handle very different tasks — but we can’t ignore that these differences generate friction.
An often-overlooked aspect of the debate is that working from home is not an option for everyone. According to Statistics Denmark, remote work has remained at a consistently high level since early 2024. In Q2 2025, four out of ten employees had worked from home within the past four weeks.
Conversely, this means that 60% show up physically every single day — in industry, service professions, healthcare, and other sectors where attendance is unavoidable.
We know that many companies are grappling with the risk of A- and B-teams, and it may be tempting to dismiss remote work as a luxury experiment for the creative class. Of course, that’s an oversimplification, as employees in the same workplace often perform very different tasks. Still, we cannot ignore that these differences create friction.
We also cannot ignore that remote work challenges leaders. Since the pandemic in 2020, CfL has conducted four surveys on change and well-being in Danish workplaces, documenting the shift toward a far more flexible work life.
In the most recent survey from March 2023, with responses from over 1,000 participants, we found that one to two days of remote work per week has become the standard. But we also saw that 56% of leaders find it harder—or much harder—to maintain and build workplace culture, and 45% say it has become more difficult to foster closeness and connection within their teams.
I am not arguing that leaders’ concerns alone should determine the extent of remote work. But workplaces must be able to accommodate individual needs and life stages without reducing organization to a default policy.
The balance between the individual, the task, and the community must be revisited—not to move backwards, but to move forward strategically. In a time of uncertainty and high demands, it is precisely now that we need to come closer together—physically as well.
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