After years of experiment, negotiation and awkward Monday morning standoffs, what does hybrid work actually look like in accountancy practice - and who's getting it right?
The bank holiday weekend has passed and LinkedIn is filling up with people announcing they're "back at it". But before the week fully swallows us, it's worth sitting with a question that never really went away - what does hybrid work actually mean now, and is the way your firm is handling it helping or costing you?
We spend a lot of time at ProTalent talking to both sides of this - candidates who are weighing up moves and practices that are hiring. And the gap between what firms say about hybrid and what candidates experience once they're in the door remains, in 2026, surprisingly wide.
Here's what we're seeing.
The policy era is over
A few years ago, the conversation was about whether hybrid was real. Would firms honour it? Would it survive when the economy got tighter? Would partners quietly start expecting five days in the office again?
Those questions have been largely answered. Hybrid is real. Firms that tried to row it back saw their best people leave. The debate now isn't whether to offer hybrid - it's whether the way it's being managed actually works.
Most firms have a policy. Most of those policies were written in a hurry and haven't been looked at since. The result is a patchwork - some managers who treat flexibility as a genuine part of how their team operates, and others who see any home working day as a concession they're grudgingly making.
Candidates pick up on this faster than firms realise.
What people are actually asking at interview
The candidates we work with - at manager level and above, typically with five to fifteen years in practice - aren't asking whether a firm has hybrid. They take that as read. What they're asking is more specific.
What does a typical Tuesday look like? Who sets the in-office days, and does it change by week? What happens if I need to shift a day because of a school pickup or a dentist appointment?
These are questions about culture and management, not policy. The honest answer to most of them is "it depends on your manager" - and that's not necessarily wrong, but it does need to be said clearly. The practices that handle this well tell candidates upfront what the lived reality is, rather than describing the policy version and hoping the candidate fills in the gaps charitably.
There is a difference. Candidates can feel it.
The 'core days' model - and why it's gaining ground
The arrangement we see working most consistently isn't a fixed headcount by day of the week. It's a principle sometimes called "core days" - a small number of days or half-days each week that are expected to be in-person because they involve things that genuinely benefit from shared physical space: team meetings, client calls, training, peer review, onboarding new starters.
Everything else is flexible, within reason.
The advantages are clear. It gives the firm what it actually needs from the office - presence, collaboration, visibility for junior staff - without treating commuting as an end in itself. And it gives the employee a predictable structure to plan around, rather than a vague "be flexible" expectation that can quietly become "be in whenever we feel like it".
The practices getting this right have also thought about what happens when someone's circumstances change. A new joiner might need more in-person time early on. A parent coming back from maternity leave might need a different rhythm for a period. The model accommodates this without creating a special case that breeds resentment elsewhere.
Where it still goes wrong
There are two failure modes we keep seeing.
The first is what you might call "policy without management". The firm has a clear hybrid statement. But nobody has trained partners and directors on how to have the conversation about flexibility with their reports. So the policy exists on paper and in job adverts, but the day-to-day reality depends entirely on the personality and preferences of whoever you report to. Some people get great flexibility. Others are quietly expected to be in most of the time, without it ever being said explicitly.
The second is inconsistency within teams. When two people doing the same job at the same level have noticeably different arrangements - and neither can explain why - it erodes trust fast. The issue isn't usually the arrangements themselves. It's the lack of a clear, shared rationale for how decisions get made.
Both problems are fixable, but they require practices to treat hybrid management as a leadership skill, not just an HR policy.
What firms hiring right now are doing differently
In the retained work we do at ProTalent, we increasingly see firms building hybrid expectations into the role brief from the start - not as a box to tick, but as a genuine description of how the team operates. The Finance Business Partner role we're currently working on in Bristol is a good example: the brief is specific about what in-office time is for, what the flexibility looks like in practice, and why the arrangement makes sense for the role. That specificity attracts the right candidates and reduces the chance of a mismatch that shows up six months in.
The firms doing this well aren't necessarily offering the most flexibility in raw terms. They're offering clarity. And in a candidate market where trust is earned through consistency, clarity counts for a lot.
National Suncream Day - 27 May 2026
Tomorrow is National Suncream Day. In the context of a workplace wellbeing post, it's a small but genuine reminder that looking after yourself - physically as well as professionally - is part of sustaining a career for the long term. UV damage accumulates quietly, often on perfectly ordinary days walking between car parks and offices. Worth building the habit before summer properly arrives.
Final Thought
Hybrid isn't a solved problem in accountancy practice. It might never be, because people's circumstances change, teams evolve, and the work itself shifts. The practices that are navigating it well aren't the ones with the most sophisticated policies - they're the ones treating it as an ongoing conversation rather than a settled answer.
If you're a candidate trying to assess whether a firm's hybrid offering is genuine, the question to ask is simple: what does a typical week actually look like for someone in this role? The quality of the answer will tell you most of what you need to know.
And if you're a firm trying to get this right - whether you're looking at your current arrangements or building a role brief for a new hire - we'd love to help.
Get in touch with Lydia at lydia@protalent.co or visit https://protalent.eu/protalent-professional/ to find out more about our retained search work.