In a hybrid or remote team, conflict rarely shows up as a raised voice or a visible argument. Instead, it shows up as a message left on read, a camera that stays off, a meeting someone quietly stops attending. Those signals are easy to miss because there’s no hallway, no shared kitchen, no body language to read.
That gap in visibility now intersects with a live legal development. On 12 February 2026, the NSW Parliament passed the Work Health and Safety Amendment (Digital Work Systems) Act 2026, the first law in Australia to directly regulate the psychosocial risks created by algorithms, automation and digital platforms at work. It hasn’t commenced yet, pending proclamation, but it puts a name on something hybrid teams have been dealing with for years: work allocated, tracked and monitored by systems rather than people, with conflict brewing in the gaps those systems don’t see.
How conflict differs in digital environments
Conflict in a hybrid team is the same underlying problem as conflict anywhere: unmet expectations, unclear roles, or a working relationship that’s broken down. What changes is how it presents.
In an office, tension gets picked up early through tone of voice, body language, or a colleague mentioning something over coffee. In a hybrid team, most of that signal is gone. Communication runs through text, which strips out tone and gets read however the reader is already feeling. Meetings replace the informal check-ins where small issues used to get resolved before they became formal ones. A staff member working from home three days a week can go a full week without a genuine two-way conversation with their manager.
The result is conflict that runs quietly for longer. By the time it surfaces, in a resignation, a formal complaint, or a sudden drop in someone’s output, it has usually been building for months.
The health and safety risk of conflict
This is where the Digital Work Systems Act matters, even before it commences. The Act introduces a new section 21A into the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW), requiring businesses to make sure the use of digital work systems, meaning algorithms, AI, automation or online platforms, doesn’t put a worker’s health and safety at risk. It covers systems that allocate tasks, track performance, monitor workers or manage rosters, and it requires businesses to keep a human genuinely in control of decisions those systems make.
For a hybrid team, this is directly relevant. Many of the tools that make remote work possible, automated scheduling, activity tracking, performance dashboards, are exactly the kind of system the Act is aimed at. A manager who leans on a tracking dashboard instead of a conversation to judge whether a remote worker is struggling is relying on a system that can’t see the actual cause. If that worker is also in unresolved conflict with a colleague or their manager, the two risks compound: a psychosocial hazard from the conflict itself, and a second one from a monitoring system standing in for the human judgement the Act says still needs to be there.
The Act’s language is broad by design. It was drafted with gig economy platforms in mind, but its definitions capture rostering tools, performance software and task allocation systems used across small and medium businesses generally, not just platform work. Any SME using digital tools to manage a distributed team falls inside its scope once it commences, and the underlying psychosocial duty it reinforces already applies today under the national framework.
The strategy to manage the risk
The five-part process from managing any psychosocial hazard still applies here. What changes is how each part works without the informal signals an office provides.
Identify. Replace the hallway conversation with a structured one. Regular one-to-ones that ask directly how things are going, not just what’s been delivered, do the job informal check-ins used to do.
Assess. Look past the dashboard. A drop in activity or output on a tracking tool might reflect an unresolved conflict, not a motivation problem. Treat the metric as a prompt to ask, not a verdict.
Control. Set a written communication norm for the team, covering things like response time expectations and how disagreements get raised, so tone isn’t left to guesswork. Keep a human decision-maker between any automated system and any judgement about a person’s performance or conduct.
Consult. Make sure remote and in-office staff get an equal say. It’s easy for consultation to default to whoever’s in the room, which leaves hybrid workers underrepresented in exactly the process meant to protect them.
Review. Revisit these controls as your team’s working pattern changes. A process built for two days a week in the office won’t automatically hold once that shifts to one, or none.
Frequently asked questions
Does the Digital Work Systems Act apply outside NSW? The Act itself is NSW legislation and hasn’t yet commenced. It applies once proclaimed, and only in NSW. Businesses in other states aren’t bound by it directly, but the underlying duty to manage psychosocial hazards, including those created by algorithmic management and monitoring tools, already exists under the national framework in every state and territory.
Is remote or hybrid work itself a psychosocial hazard? No. Hybrid and remote work aren’t hazards on their own. The risk comes from how conflict, isolation or unclear expectations go unmanaged in that setting, not from the work arrangement itself.
What kind of tools does the Digital Work Systems Act cover? Automated rostering and scheduling tools, performance-tracking software, algorithmic task allocation systems, and any platform that uses AI, automation or an algorithm to allocate or monitor work. Ordinary tools like email and messaging platforms were specifically excluded from the definition.
How do you spot conflict in a hybrid team before it escalates? Structured, regular one-to-ones that ask about the working relationship directly, not just output. Waiting for a performance metric to flag a problem misses conflict that a metric was never built to detect.
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