Hybrid Inequality: How Flexible Work Quietly Creates Two Classes of Employees

As of 2026, almost three quarters of organizations operate under some kind of hybrid model. Now the dominant way of working, hybrid has brought unparalleled flexibility to the workplace.

But if that flexibility isn't structured, it doesn't create freedom, it creates chaos. Within that chaos, productivity is likely to drop, mental health is likely to suffer, trust decays and inequality runs rife.

When we think of workplace inequality, we all know the warning signs of policy discrimination. But this is a different and more subtle kind of disempowerment - visible in who receives meeting links, who attends a regional satellite office meetup, who gets pulled into rooms on last-minute product meetings, who is informally mentored, individually recognized and ultimately then promoted.

Just below the surface of the hybrid work silver bullet, a quiet but existential problem is emerging - one most organizations haven't named yet, let alone designed against.

When hybrid models are under-designed, companies default to what's easiest: presence as a proxy for performance, visibility as a shortcut for trust, attendance as proof of alignment and loudness as a sign of leadership.

The result is not one hybrid experience, but two.

There's the experience of the employees that are visible at work, get pulled into decision-making processes, receive informal off-the-cuff mentorship, cut through the noise even in a remote organization to make themselves known to leadership.

Then there's the employees who are technically included, but structurally excluded. They receive formal feedback once a month but no informal guidance from leaders day-to-day, they perform well but don't get any exposure to the conversations that shape those projects, they work well in teams but miss out on spontaneous collaborative opportunities - and they have great potential but lack the social capital to turn contribution into recognition.

Introducing the second-class employee: not underperforming, not disengaged, but quietly deprived of access to the ingredients of success: organic mentorship, shared context, leadership visibility and social capital.

This is a glaring moral issue, but it's also an existential and material business risk - tied directly to productivity, long-term performance, loyalty and retention. This isn't an HR issue, a failing of the middle manager, or even a lack of strategic direction at a C-suite level. It's structural.

Hybrid work has changed the underlying mechanics of how work happens, but most organizations are still running on professional infrastructure designed for a single office, stable teams, and constant co-location.

With change happening so rapidly, departments have updated their policies in siloes: HR set new attendance guidelines, real estate leased new flex hubs, managers created new workflows. But when no one owns the system end-to-end, employees fall through the gaps, have to navigate ambiguity alone and inequality emerges by default.

Because the two-tier employee problem isn't one that will be fixed by policy, it needs to be redesigned using intentional infrastructure. Croissant data shows that just 4% of companies are actively orchestrating their flexible work model with a coherent hybrid work policy. Everyone else is improvising, relying on habits, proximity, and informal norms to fill the gaps. And when infrastructure is missing, the same people always pay the price: those with less visibility, less confidence, fewer relationships, or less access to the physical office.

Hybrid work was meant to bring flexibility. But in too many organizations, it's actually delivering something else: inequality. Join us as we explore the people problem that's eroding the culture, creativity and profits of hybrid businesses, and how to avoid a hidden hierarchy in your organization.

The Hidden Hierarchy: How Poorly Executed Hybrid Models Bring Friction Not Freedom

You may be thinking: "but surely, on balance, hybrid work is freeing for employees?" Yes, it brought the shiny promise of more autonomy over schedules, logistical and financial relief from long commutes, a better work-life balance and a shift away from the rigidity and control of a nine-to-five in central office.

It's true that 46% of workers say they'd leave their job over returning to full-time office work if their employer required it. In fact, over a million UK workers left jobs because of a lack of flexible options in the last year. Nine in every ten US employees say they wouldn't start a new role without some degree of remote flexibility.

But preference doesn't mean it performs well, and popularity isn't a promise of fairness.

What felt empowering at first has, in many organizations, quietly exposed the difference between flexibility and a free-for-all. Without structure, hybrid work doesn't liberate everyone equally. It advantages the visible, the confident, the well-connected and leaves others excluded, unclear and unmotivated.

The signs are there already. Only 34% of employees in the hybrid work era say they're thriving in their jobs, one in four US workers say they have no friends at work, a clear sign of deepening social isolation and a culture breakdown. Job satisfaction in the US has actually declined compared with pre-pandemic levels - with employee engagement hitting a 10-year low last year.

This is when the second-class employee emerges: when there isn't the infrastructure to bring predictability to flexibility and to distribute the benefits of hybrid work across the workforce. So what are the hallmarks of a two-tier organization?

What Does A Two-tier Hybrid Organization Look Like?

Out of sight becomes out of context

Hybrid work has made access to professional context painfully uneven. In traditional offices, shared context emerged by default. People overheard decisions, absorbed priorities, and learned the "why" behind work just by being in the right place at the right time. In hybrid environments, context has to be documented and intentionally distributed.

When it isn't, it becomes an insider currency owned by whoever was in the hallway when the client conversation happened, who joined the off-calendar call that explained that new sales strategy or the lucky product manager that bumped into their director at the coffee machine and learned what mattered most to them this quarter. These moments don't disappear in hybrid, they just stop being evenly accessible.

Only half of US employees say they have a strong sense of what is expected of them at work - a figure that has nosedived in recent years. When context isn't shared deliberately, some employees operate with the full narrative while others work from fragments. Over time, this creates a context divide. One group produces work informed by strategy, nuance, and intent. The other brings strong skills, experience and enthusiasm to their work but it misses the mark because they simply don't have the full picture.

The result is a familiar pattern: managers spend more time correcting and re-aligning second-class employees, mistaking information gaps for performance issues. Those employees feel increasingly disconnected from the organization, less confident in their contributions, and less loyal over time.

New hires either sink or swim

Today's onboarding processes tend to include workflows, tools, checklists and rules, without supporting new employees to build relationships, social capital and those unspoken norms that underpin a professional culture - from acronyms, to how to address your leaders, how to deal with challenging individuals or persuade your product manager to change their mind. In fact, just 12% of US employees think their organization does a good job onboarding new hires.

When onboarding is weak and untailored to hybrid work, it doesn't fail loudly, it fails unevenly - meaning inequality starts at the door.

Some new hires know who to ask for help, feel confident introducing themselves to leadership, get themselves invited to conversations outside of the regularly scheduled meetings and seek out mentors. Others meet their KPIs, but fail to develop in their roles because they don't build a network, have access to social contexts and wouldn't assert their way into that meeting they weren't invited to.

Without intentional remote onboarding programs, it's down to the individual to seek out opportunity and advancement, and only some achieve that without support. It's every new hire for themselves - a recipe for churn, failed probation periods and slower internal promotion.

Proximity bias reigns supreme

Research shows physical proximity leads to better and higher quality feedback at work. For instance, sitting near teammates has been shown to increase coding feedback by almost 20%, a metric that directly correlates with improved output quality and faster skill acquisition. On the other hand, 42% of managers have said they sometimes forget about remote workers when assigning tasks.

Leaders naturally favor people they see more often. It's no surprise that there's a growing number of employees who come to the office for a few hours just to check in, have a coffee and show their face before returning home to actually work. Because without intervention, managers in hybrid organizations will default to presence as a measure of performance.

That is why remote workers are promoted 30% less frequently than those that work in office. Recognition, opportunity and advancement are often given to the most visible employee that makes it to central HQ, rather than the quietly brilliant high-performing worker that might opt for a regional collaborative hub so they can take part in value-adding after-work activities like a coding club or language lesson.

This reveals an exclusionary and worrying work environment. The losers? Those that can't come into the office just to 'show face' and perform their presence because of where they live, their income, family responsibilities - or even just their social confidence.

That's a tragedy not just for the hard working employee that gets overlooked every time for that project lead or client meeting, and for your organization that loses out on a potentially excellent leader, just because of proximity bias.

Cliques emerge and connections lower

Hybrid work was hailed for its ability to flatten hierarchy and make professional networks more accessible, but in reality it's making those networks smaller.

Even at a digital-first organization like Microsoft, internal research found that the shift to hybrid work caused collaboration networks to become significantly more siloed. Employees spent 25% less time working across teams, added new collaborators more slowly, and relied more heavily on familiar connections. The informal interaction network declined by 28% for remote workers compared with in-office peers.

Social capital and personal relationships are the connective tissue that allows information and innovation to flow across all levels of an organization. It's also what makes work visible to others. When hybrid is improvised, there's no default office, no guaranteed overlap, no shared space where relationships form by accident like they used to. So instead of broad networks, employees tend to cluster into small, self-protective groups.

Croissant data shows individuals fill this void by self-organizing: returning to the same coworking space each Friday, forming recurring in-person micro-groups or creating standing remote sessions to share context and ideas. These clusters help people stay productive, and build powerful pockets of culture, but they also fragment the organization.

The result is a two-tier network. Some employees sit inside dense collaboration loops, accessing information early and influencing decisions informally. Others operate at the edges, waiting for updates after decisions are already made, feeling isolated and under-recognized. In other words, inequality becomes a structural inevitability.

The Quiet and Costly Brain Drain: The Risk of Baked In Inequality

Hybrid inequality isn't a loud problem. It's a silent drain on your bottom line, culture, values and human capital. So who feels the friction first?

Junior employees who are particularly reliant on feedback loops, informal coaching and seeing seniors model professional behaviour. Failure to address this thins your future leadership pipeline in real-time.

Introverted employees who are excellent at their jobs but less equipped to self-promote in a remote context. A lack of structure to create space for quieter employees could lead highly experienced but less social team members to seek out a more inclusive environment.

Minority workers who excel against their KPIs but are less likely to push for visibility in unstructured remote environments that end up amplifying existing power dynamics and rewarding the most privileged or connected. This means organizations with extensive diversity initiatives end up failing on their inclusion goals because the achievements of underrepresented groups are simply recognized less. The outcome? Redlining employee loyalty, higher attrition rates and a leadership pipeline that looks far less diverse than the workforce it presides over.

But what's the risk here for leadership?

• High churn rates.40% of tech workers say they left their last job due to unfair treatment. Second-class employees quickly feel more disconnected from your organization's mission or culture when a sense of belonging is eroded. There's no use waiting for their feedback because a disempowered employee won't always complain, or try to fix the problem that left them excluded. They'll simply look elsewhere for more equitable work.
• Legal and reputational exposure. When quiet inequality becomes a pattern in hybrid teams, promotion gaps, pay disparities and access inequity thrive. What starts as an unintentional drift could soon become a legal or reputational liability as regulators and employees become more attuned to workplace discrimination, and the values of organizations become a differentiator in talent wars.
• Lower productivity. Out-of-the-loop employees don't just suffer, their work slows through a lack of alignment, relationships and exposure to decision-making. In fact almost half of remote employees say their work feels chaotic, leading to operational drag.
• Performative work rather than powerful work. Some of the most valuable work people do isn't obvious. If proximity bias isn't addressed, employees report spending more than a third of their time on performative work to signal their productivity to leaders. This creates an operational state where 41% of time at work is spent on tasks that don't actually build organizational value, creating a dangerous cycle of burnout, unproductiveness and appearance over integrity.
• Poor client outcomes. If your workforce is divided into an inner and outer circle, misalignment reigns supreme. Your clients will sense this immediately in inconsistent messaging, duplication and a less confident service. Engaged and empowered teams are proven to achieve 18% higher sales. Inequality isn't just an internal problem or a soft HR issue, it is proven to impact sales, your bottom line and your external reputation.
• Talent misallocation. It's not just that talented second-class employees leave, the issue is also that the wrong people stay - and are promoted too. More visible or more confident employees often accumulate opportunity when hybrid infrastructure fails to uplift employees on the basis of merit not just proximity. This means tomorrow's leaders are weaker and less accomplished, embedding a value leak right at the heart of your organization's future.
• Hidden P&L drag. Unaddressed inequality isn't a line item on the balance sheet. It leaks into your P&L silently through inefficiency, waste, duplication and poor performance. The culture friction of inner and outer circles quickly turns into margin erosion when context has to be re-explained, projects stall waiting for sign off from those in the know, and client outreach is embarrassingly duplicated due to poor information sharing. Inequality-driven inefficiency means inflated human cost and lower return on talent, weaker sales figures and slower execution cycles - which you'll rapidly see in your bottom line, undoing any cost savings from the shift to hybrid work.

Designing Hybrid For Equity As Well as Flexibility

You can have all the best intentions in the world, but without strategic design, hybrid inequity will grow. So what does designing for equity in 2026 actually look like?

Make collaboration predictable rather than optional. Building in predictable in-person collaboration windows will create defined moments for mentorship and mutual inspiration that are accessible to all. When these are optional, inclusion becomes optional too. Creating reliable rhythms is a key marker of the shift from accidental hybrid to intentional hybrid, meaning an opportunity isn't tied to who happens to be nearby when it's handed out.

Give out shared context on purpose. Not everyone will run into the CEO in the hallway anymore to learn about what their greatest challenge is that quarter. In hybrid work, moments of shared context must happen by design through context briefings, drop-in decision-making workshops with senior leadership, onboarding structured with remote in mind and rules around shadow meetings.

Measure access not attendance. Build an equity telemetry layer, rather than just looking to attendance data for a temperature check on your workforce. Track equity signals like feedback frequency, promotion velocity against work patterns and ethnicity, meeting leadership and contribution, network growth and the frequency of invitations to collaborate.

Train managers to level the hybrid playing field. Middle managers are more stretched than ever, and often lack the training to manage a diversity of employees remotely. Upskill your middle layer on inclusive meeting mechanics, structured mentorship in teams distributed across timezones and regions, onboarding that builds social capital rather than just tool literacy and addressing visibility bias.

Treat space as an access layer, not a perk.A strategic multispace model which reimagines the office as an infrastructure layer can help break down inequality and build access. That's because it offers neutral ground to dissolve workplace politics outside of HQ 'home turf', enables mentorship in local clusters, reduces the commute tax that excludes some by default and offers a range of workspace options for individual needs.

Treat your hybrid work policy as your most important product. When hybrid descends into chaos, the same people always win: those that shout the loudest, have the smallest commutes, already know the leadership and are confident self-promoting. Equitable hybrid needs strategic guardrails about what work is done in person vs at home, how often teams gather in person and align virtually, how decisions and context are documented, how new remote hires grow their network and what fair visibility and promotion conversations look like.

Modern flexibility comes with a hidden tax: hybrid inequality. If you want your hybrid model to work to your advantage, equity has to be a company-wide infrastructural design requirement - rather than just a HR hope. This year, the companies that succeed at hybrid won't be the ones that are the most flexible, they'll be the ones that made flexibility fair. Get in touch with Croissant to make your workspace offering equitable as well as flexible in 2026.