Jomana Elwenni runs HR for Orangetheory Fitness Canada, where her team supports more than 115 locations of mostly hourly, shift-based employees. That is a different operating reality than the one most hybrid-work conversations are designed for, and it shaped Jomana's perspective on what hybrid actually means in practice. As Director of Human Resources, named one of Canada's most promising young HR leaders, she has spent her career thinking about engaged cultures and natural leadership in environments where the office-versus-remote framing does not really apply.
Her conversation on Reimagining Company Culture was useful because she pushed back gently on the assumption that hybrid is a single thing. For corporate roles, hybrid often means a few days at home and a few days in the office. For franchise networks, distributed retail teams, or studio-based businesses, hybrid means something more nuanced about how leaders, regional managers, and front-line teams stay connected when nobody is sitting in the same building.
What Hybrid Really Means in a Distributed Network
The hybrid debate often skips over the operational complexity of running people work across many physical sites. Gallup's hybrid work indicator shows that knowledge workers want some flexibility, but the harder design problem is for organizations whose front-line work has to happen in physical locations. Jomana's framing was that hybrid is less about where individual employees sit and more about how information, support, and culture move across geography.
HBR research on flexible work is consistent with this. The benefits of flexibility are real, but they require structure to land. Without it, distance produces drift. Drift produces disengagement. Disengagement produces turnover. The chain is predictable and avoidable.
How to Design Engagement Across a Distributed Network
What does engagement look like for hourly, multi-site teams?
Jomana described an engagement model rooted in regional leaders, not corporate HR. Her team supports regional managers with playbooks, communication tools, and cadence, and trusts those leaders to make engagement local. Centralized engagement programs tend to fail in franchise environments because they cannot adapt to local context. Distributed engagement run by trained regional leaders does adapt, and it scales.
How do you keep front-line employees connected to corporate strategy?
By translating strategy into specific, location-level actions. Front-line employees engage with strategy when they see how it affects their day. Abstract corporate themes do not move them. Concrete operational changes that they understand, can influence, and see results from do.
What Actually Works for Hybrid Engagement
Principle 1: Make manager rhythm the engagement engine
In distributed organizations, engagement lives at the manager level. The cadence of one-on-ones, team huddles, and regional check-ins drives everything else. Companies that invest in manager rhythm see consistent engagement across regions. Companies that rely on corporate programs see wide variance team to team.
Principle 2: Use feedback channels designed for distributed reality
Surveys that depend on a corporate email account miss most front-line employees. AllVoices' pulse surveys and employee survey tool give multi-site organizations a way to hear from teams across locations through channels that work for hourly and shift-based workers, not just office staff.
Principle 3: Treat workplace flexibility as a design choice with trade-offs
Flexibility is not free. It requires investment in scheduling tools, communication systems, manager training, and culture. Organizations that pretend hybrid is a small change often end up with quieter, more polite drift. Organizations that treat it as a real operating model design their entire HR stack around it.
Where People Operations Fits
Hybrid engagement sits inside broader work on people team efficiency and human resources. The teams that win at this build infrastructure once and reuse it across locations. AllVoices' HR case management helps regional and corporate HR keep consistent practice on issues that surface differently from location to location.
Sweetgreen has been an instructive success story in this space because their model depends on consistent culture and engagement across many physical locations. The lesson is that culture in distributed networks is built at the team level and reinforced by infrastructure, not the other way around.
How HR uses engagement signals across regions
The mature pattern is to look at engagement and ER signals by region, role family, and tenure. Patterns surface that are invisible at the company level. A specific region with rising case volume. A role family where engagement is dropping. A tenure band where attrition is concentrated. Acting on those patterns is what turns engagement work into real retention.
Frequently Asked Questions About Hybrid Engagement
How do you measure engagement consistently across many locations?
Use a small set of standard pulse questions everywhere, then add location-specific questions for context. The standard set lets you compare across regions. The location-specific set catches what is unique to each site.
What is the biggest mistake organizations make with hybrid engagement?
Designing for the loudest population. Often that means head office gets the best engagement programs while front-line teams get whatever fits in a shift huddle. Reverse that. Design first for the population with the least flexibility and the least access, then add for everyone else.
How important are in-person moments in hybrid models?
Important and underrated. Periodic in-person events for distributed teams create relationship density that remote interactions cannot replicate. The cost is real, but so is the engagement and retention payoff.
What do remote managers need that in-person managers do not?
More structure. Clear cadence. Better tools to track team-level health. Permission to invest more time in relationship-building. Remote management is not a worse version of in-person management. It is a different discipline that requires its own training.
How do you keep culture consistent across locations?
Through regional leaders, not through corporate edicts. Consistency comes from the way regional leaders model values, give feedback, and run their teams. HR's job is to make sure those leaders have the support, training, and resources to be the culture carriers their teams actually feel.
How do you handle engagement when leadership is far removed from front-line work?
By bringing leaders closer, deliberately. Senior leaders who spend time at sites, on shifts, or in regional team meetings have a different read on what is actually happening than leaders who rely only on dashboards. The companies that build that practice into the operating cadence get earlier signals on engagement issues and credibility with front-line teams. The companies that skip it tend to discover problems after they have already cost them their best regional managers and crew leads.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Jomana's vantage point inside a national franchise network reinforces a useful corrective. Hybrid engagement is an infrastructure question, not just a flexibility question. Companies that build the infrastructure (manager rhythm, feedback channels, regional leadership development, consistent tooling) get engagement that holds up under distance. Companies that treat hybrid as a remote-work decision miss the harder problem and the bigger opportunity.
The teams that win at this know their regions, listen at the team level, and trust their managers to translate corporate intent into local action. The result is a workforce that feels supported wherever they happen to work, with the kind of engagement that survives growth, geography, and the operational realities of running people work at scale.
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