© Luis Alvarez - Getty Images office worker having a Zoom meeting

In the perpetual return-to-office showdown, this much is clear: Few companies have been able to execute a seamless hybrid plan that everyone’s happy with—or at least not quitting-level mad about.

While more workers are back in office than ever, companies who set a firm return-to-office deadlines seem to be struggling. ConsiderGeneral Motors, which set a lofty three days a week in-office goal only to later walk it back, saying that their return to office plan wouldn’t take shape until next year at the earliest. Things aren’t much better at Apple, where workers have threatened to quit over the company's hybrid work plan.

But other hybrid plans “are very good,” Nick Bloom, Stanford economist and co-founder of WFH Research, told Fortune.  He named three standouts across three different industries who are getting hybrid work right: Salesforce; Lazard, and Elevance Health—specifically, Blue Shield of California.

They all follow a similar hybrid model, he explains: toggling between in-office and remote work on a team-by-team basis instead of a top-down approach. Bloom calls this model “organized hybrid.”

His research consistently finds that people come to work not for free snacks or plush couches, but to be with colleagues. It’s what he calls social work, and it includes training, mentoring, and the collaborative thinking that all companies try to center as the selling point of being in office.

The disaster scenario, which he says too many companies are entertaining, is telling everyone to come in two days a week of their choosing.

“Then they come in and realize their team is all at home, which defeats the purpose,” Bloom says. “They didn’t come in to use the ping pong table, and there’s no point in coming in just to shout at Zoom all day.”

Granted, pulling off hybrid work is far from one size fits all and is especially dependent on firm size. Bloom’s examples each employ thousands of workers.

At businesses of all sizes, managers have struggled to get a handle on remote work, Bloom has found. Middle managers working hybrid report feeling less connected to their company culture than fully remote or fully in-office managers, and many recently called return-to-work planning lonely and confusing. 

That’s mainly because the current iteration of the future of work “is a pretty challenging 180-degree turn” from last year, Bloom says. For 2020 and the pre-vaccine half of 2021, the game plan was avoiding too many people in the office at once. But now that many workplaces have dropped their precautions and mask requirements, making set plans poses a new challenge. 

Luckily, Bloom’s deep well of research has introduced four big ways that most companies—even those without Salesforce or Lazard’s resources—can follow for a seamless hybrid plan: One, like his Big 3, ensure your team comes in on the same days; two, front load those days with in-person meetings and events; three, promote cross-office Zoom meetings and “deep thinking” work on remote days; and four, relatively new hires should come in an extra day each week for mentoring.

Done correctly, Bloom says, the only questions employees will ask is why their company wasn’t doing this sooner.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

More from Fortune: 

IBM’s former CEO downplays the importance of a college degree for six-figure earning ‘new collar’ jobs

American cities are preparing for the worst

Managing Gen Z is like working with people from a ‘different country’

‘Ridiculously stupid’ economic policies have the U.S. hurtling toward a ‘perfect storm’ of economic pain, Ray Dalio says

When Leando Perez arrived back in the APAC region in February 2020 as Salesforce's vice-president and CMO, he had no idea of what he was about to walk into.

His return to region came only two weeks out from the local iteration of the company's annual World Tour event, which he expected to see function like a well-oiled machine.

"I had come from HQ where I was part of the team delivering the Dreamforce keynote and taking it around the world. So when I came into region, I thought 'the machine is running, we know what we are doing'," he says.

Covid-19 had other plans however. When it became clear days later the crisis was spiralling out of control, Perez and his colleagues made a snap decision to cancel the local event's physical component and take it all virtual.

"These folks had been planning this for months, and then suddenly that plan wasn't there anymore," Perez says. "I had to do two things. One was help them not lose motivation. The other was we had to manage strong stakeholder in sales and distribution, and they had big expectations."

That Perez and his team were able to achieve both outcomes speak volume of their adaptability – some of which Perez attributes to the ability of Salesforce' platform to support virtual engagements. These include Community Cloud software, which allows users to create virtual meeting rooms. The experience also kicked off a learning journey that has had a significant impact on how Salesforce managed future events and continues to play out, through the exact 2022 Dreamforce conference and beyond.

While 2021 saw the World Tour return with a purely digital model, subsequent events have been run in a hybrid fashion, which has posed its own challenges. Perez says prior to Covid, it was common to record keynote presentations for digital playback, with the remote audience always viewed as a secondary audience.

"When that first pivot happened, we realised there was no one in the room, so the online audience was the most important audience," Perez says. "But then we went to year two and thought about all the other sessions. How do you capture footage, how do you uplevel it?