Hybrid work has the worst satisfaction scores of any work model

NEW YORK, UNITED STATES — Hybrid work now covers 42% of U.S. companies — but it consistently scores lower in employee satisfaction than either fully remote or fully in-office arrangements, according to an analysis from Fortune. 

Hybrid leads in adoption but trails in satisfaction

“We are explicitly not hybrid. We think this is the worst of all worlds,” said Melanie Rosenwasser, Chief People Officer at Dropbox, which has remained fully virtual since 2020 and met its financial targets under the policy. 

The Drake University data supports her position: in both 2022 and 2025, hybrid-preferring employees rated their arrangement lowest among the three work models studied.

In 2025, 72% of fully remote workers approved of their work model and 60% of in-office workers approved of theirs — but only 63% of hybrid workers approved of hybrid, a gap that held even as overall satisfaction across all three models improved over three years.

Hybrid fatigue erodes the model’s appeal over time

“I still value the flexibility to be able to work from home when needed, but I think getting out of a consistent rhythm has made me prefer working in the office,” one employee in the study told Drake University researchers Radostina Purvanova and Alanah Mitchell, whose work coined the term “paradox management fatigue” to describe the psychological cost of constant mode-switching.

Among employees who preferred hybrid in 2022, only half still preferred it by 2025.

Defectors split in both directions: some moved toward full-time office structure, others toward fully remote work.

During the same period, the share of companies implementing hybrid policies more than doubled — from 20% in 2023 to 42% in 2025, according to the Flex Index — even as employee satisfaction with the model trailed both alternatives.

The Drake study found that hybrid produced the lowest satisfaction scores in both 2022 and 2025 — making it the only work model that was simultaneously the fastest-growing employer preference and the  least-preferred employee experience measured.

For BPO providers, the findings reframe a common pitch: hybrid arrangements marketed as flexible options do not automatically register as benefits with workers who live them. 

Providers who implement hybrid schedules without clear rationale — specific days tied to collaboration needs, not arbitrary attendance mandates — risk generating the same paradox fatigue the Drake study documents. 

Hybrid works best when workers can build a stable life around it; deployed as a compromise between two preferences, it tends to satisfy neither fully.