Hint: It’s Not the Office Layout

The return-to-office debate has become a fixture in Indian workplaces too. IT majors and startups alike swing between mandating five-day office attendance, offering hybrid flexibility, or letting teams stay fully remote — each camp convinced their model is what drives performance. New research suggests the entire debate may be missing the point.

Psychologist Ron Friedman, founder of Superteams Inc., surveyed more than 6,000 knowledge workers across industries to find out what actually separates high-performing teams — “superteams,” as he calls them — from average ones. He tested everything from leadership style to office amenities: gyms, ping-pong tables, free coffee, collaborative lounges, private cabins. Of the 20-plus perks studied, only one showed a consistent link to high performance — access to a quiet space for focused, uninterrupted work. Members of superteams were 52% more likely than average teams to report having this.

Perhaps the more interesting finding is what didn’t matter: where people worked. Superteams turned up in equal measure among fully remote, hybrid, and fully in-office setups. Friedman’s explanation is that every arrangement brings its own distractions — in-office teams deal with interruptions and the pressure of constant availability, while hybrid and remote teams often end up buried in messages and back-to-back video calls instead.

What set the superteams apart wasn’t location but discipline. They protected focus time deliberately — scheduling blocks where people weren’t expected to respond to messages, keeping some days meeting-free, and documenting routine processes so colleagues didn’t need to interrupt one another just to check on progress. In short: less reliance on constant interaction, more reliance on systems that kept everyone aligned without it.

The takeaway for leaders, per Friedman, isn’t to chase a particular office design or attendance policy, but to treat focused, independent work as part of collaboration itself — and to build in the structures (focus blocks, meeting-free stretches, clear documentation) that protect it, regardless of where the team happens to be sitting.