DOL guidance frames Monday.com hybrid work as global business strategy

Hybrid only works when the rules get concrete

The Department of Labor’s flexible-work guidance lands at the exact pressure point monday.com employees live with every day: hybrid work is only useful when it is translated into clear operating norms. For a company that says most teams spend three days a week together in the office, the real question is not whether flexibility sounds good. It is how that flexibility changes scheduling, documentation, response times, and manager expectations across a global software business.

That matters because monday.com is not treating hybrid as a side benefit. Its careers page says the company uses a hybrid work model, and that most teams spend three days a week together in the office to collaborate and connect. The company also describes itself as global, with hiring across 16 locations and 20 teams. In other words, the way work is organized is part of the product story, the talent story, and the customer-support story all at once.

Why the DOL’s guidance matters inside a software company

The Labor Department’s framework is useful because it pushes hybrid work back toward first principles. It says flexible arrangements are in demand because employees want balance and employers want a competitive edge in attracting and retaining talent. It also says telework can give employees more control over their schedules, reduce work-life stress, and provide an alternative workplace arrangement in emergencies. That is not just human-resources language. It is a reminder that flexibility has to function in real workflows, or it becomes little more than branding.

For monday.com, that translates into a daily operating problem. Remote and hybrid work shape productivity, retention, collaboration, and customer coverage across geographies. A company selling work-management software has to show that distributed work can be organized cleanly, especially when employees are split across cities and time zones. The policy only works if people know when they are expected to be available, where decisions are documented, and which work must happen in sync.

The hidden compliance layer: hours, pay, and leave

The Labor Department’s FLSA and FMLA telework guidance adds the part many companies overlook until it causes trouble. Nonexempt employees must be paid for all hours worked, even when that work happens at home or away from the employer’s premises. Short breaks of 20 minutes or less are generally compensable, and the rules apply whether the employee is on-site or teleworking. The guidance also makes clear that FMLA eligibility rules can still apply when employees work away from an employer’s facility.

That means hybrid work is not just a question of where people sit. It requires time tracking, clear expectations, and manager behavior that does not blur the line between flexibility and unpaid labor. If a team is meeting three days a week in the office, the missing two days still need guardrails: who is on call, how response windows work, and how to avoid assuming that a home office means unlimited availability. Without that, flexibility can turn into confusion quickly.

What a real hybrid operating model looks like

For monday.com, the practical challenge is to turn an abstract policy into a repeatable team rhythm. Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom says about 70 percent of firms plan to implement some form of hybrid working arrangement, which suggests monday.com is operating inside a broad market shift rather than a niche experiment. Stanford’s summary of Bloom’s research on Trip.com workers shows why so many employers are trying to make it work: people who worked from home two days a week were just as productive and just as likely to be promoted, while resignations fell by 33 percent.

That kind of result only holds if the operating model is disciplined. The strongest hybrid teams usually make four things explicit:

• Scheduling: define which days are for overlap, which meetings require in-person attendance, and which work should stay async.

• Documentation: capture decisions, project updates, and customer issues in shared systems so the office does not become the only place where context exists.

• Response times: set expectations by channel and by region, so employees in New York, Tel Aviv-Yafo, London, Singapore, and Sydney are not all judged against the same clock.

• Manager expectations: evaluate output, not visibility, and make sure leaders know when to protect focus time, break time, and leave rights.

This is where monday.com’s own business model makes the story sharper. The company sells collaboration software, so its internal practices inevitably shape how credible it looks to customers trying to solve the same problem.

A global footprint makes the stakes higher

Built In describes monday.com as a hybrid workplace with typical on-site time of three days a week and lists offices in New York, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Denver, London, Melbourne, Munich, Paris, São Paulo, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo, and Warsaw. That footprint matters because hybrid policy is not being managed for one office culture or one labor market. It has to work across regions, functions, and legal regimes, while still giving teams a shared way to move work forward.

Bloom has said about 100 million workers worldwide now spend a mix of days at home and in the office each week. monday.com is part of that shift, but it is also a beneficiary of it. A company with 20 teams and 16 hiring locations can widen its talent pool when its work model is predictable enough for people to join from more places. The tradeoff is that the company has to make the model legible, so collaboration does not depend on who is physically near the room where decisions happen.

Why this is also a business-strategy story

The public-company details underscore that hybrid work at monday.com is tied to scale, not sentiment. The company announced the filing of its 2024 Annual Report on Form 20-F on March 17, 2025. As of December 31, 2024, it had 50,773,337 ordinary shares outstanding. It reported fourth-quarter 2024 revenue of $268.0 million and full-year 2024 revenue of $956.3 million, while saying more than 250,000 customers worldwide use its platform.

That scale makes workflow discipline harder, not easier. The larger the customer base, the more important it becomes that internal teams know how to cover regions, escalate issues, and coordinate without relying on constant overlap. The company’s 2024 ESG report, published on June 26, 2025, says it included ESG goals for 2025 and points to a more inclusive, responsible, and sustainable future. Its ESG page says monday.com has 10 active employee resource groups globally, which reinforces that culture at the company is being managed as an operational system, not a slogan.

The bottom line is simple: the DOL’s guidance, Stanford’s hybrid research, and monday.com’s own footprint all point in the same direction. Hybrid work succeeds when companies define it as an operating model, not a vibe. At monday.com, that means the difference between flexibility and confusion will come down to whether teams can make schedules, documentation, and manager expectations as deliberate as the software they sell.