Hybrid work is often framed as a question of employee preference, productivity, or the optimal number of days spent on-site. This framing obscures a more difficult organizational problem: flexibility is distributed through jobs, managerial relationships, team norms, control systems, and career processes that do not affect all employees equally. This Critical Viewpoint Article examines who benefits from hybrid flexibility when formal permission coexists with informal control. It argues that the consequences of hybrid work cannot be understood by treating remote or on-site presence as intrinsically advantageous. Instead, career exposure, managerial discretion, flexibility stigma, work-intensification pressures, occupational access, and coordination dependencies jointly shape whether flexibility functions as meaningful autonomy, constrained accommodation, or transferred responsibility. The article develops the proposed Equitable Flexibility Governance Framework, an original conceptual synthesis organized around access parity, evaluation parity, transparent discretion and control, boundary protection, interaction parity, and distributional accountability. These principles are normative design propositions rather than validated interventions. They are intended to clarify where organizational choices require evidence, contestability, and attention to unequal consequences. The argument also emphasizes countervailing evidence: hybrid and geographically flexible arrangements can support retention, satisfaction, employment continuity, and productivity in some contexts, while remote work may reduce certain interpersonal disadvantages. The framework therefore rejects universal prescriptions. Its propositions require longitudinal, multilevel, experimental, network, and qualitative testing across occupations, social groups, managerial systems, and institutional settings.
