Your Hybrid Policy Created Two Classes of Employees

Picture a campfire. Twelve people sit in a circle. The fire throws light and warmth evenly. Everyone can see everyone else's face. The conversation moves naturally because the environment is shared. No one is closer to the flame than anyone else.

Now imagine that same campfire, but five of the twelve people are sitting thirty feet back, in the dark. They can see the glow. They can hear fragments of the conversation if the wind is right. Occasionally someone by the fire turns around and shouts an update in their direction. But they're not in the circle. They're watching it.

That's your hybrid meeting.

The Distance You Can't Measure With a Map

Dr. Karen Sobel Lojeski has spent years studying something she calls "virtual distance," the psychological and emotional detachment that grows when most of our interactions happen through screens. Her research, conducted across hundreds of teams and funded in part by Microsoft, found that virtual distance has a significant negative impact on trust, innovation, and project success. But here's what's counterintuitive: physical distance (how many miles apart people are) turned out to be the least important factor. What mattered far more was operational distance (how disconnected people felt from shared workflows) and affinity distance (how emotionally detached they felt from their teammates).

In other words, you can sit in the same building as someone and still experience high virtual distance. And you can be in a different time zone and feel deeply connected. The technology isn't the problem. The problem is what happens to relationships when some people are consistently on the outside of the shared experience.

The Two-Class System

Researchers have a name for what hybrid work does when it's poorly designed. They call it "proximity bias," the unconscious tendency to favor the people you physically see over the people you don't. The data on this is uncomfortable.

Remote employees are 38% less likely to receive a bonus than on-site workers, according to a UK Office for National Statistics study, even when their performance is comparable. About 42% of supervisors admit they sometimes forget about remote workers when assigning tasks. Microsoft's own research found that 43% of remote employees and 44% of hybrid employees say they don't feel included in meetings. And roughly 59% of remote workers worry about being left out of important discussions entirely.

The result is a workplace that technically includes everyone but practically favors whoever happens to be in the room. Promotions go to the people leaders see walking past their office. High-visibility projects go to the people who happen to be at the whiteboard when ideas are forming. And the remote team members, who may actually be more productive (research suggests a 13% performance increase for remote workers), slowly drift into a second tier. Not because they're less capable, but because they're less visible.

It's proximity bias creating what one workplace researcher described as a "two-class system." Visible employees in one class. Invisible employees in another.

What Camp Already Knows

If you've worked at a summer camp, you already understand the power of the shared circle. Morning meetings where everyone stands together. Evening programs where the whole camp sits in the same space. Staff meetings where you can see who's nodding, who's confused, who wants to speak but hasn't found the opening yet.

Camp culture is built on the assumption that presence is equal. When someone misses a staff meeting, they don't just miss information. They miss context. They miss tone. They miss the moment when the group laughed together or when the mood shifted because someone brought up something hard. Those moments are the invisible glue that turns coworkers into a team.

Now think about the off-season. Many camps run year-round programming, or they have year-round staff managing registration, marketing, and facilities. Some of those people work on site. Some work from home. And in that arrangement, the same dynamics that plague every hybrid workplace start to creep in.

The people in the office have lunch together. They overhear conversations. They get pulled into spontaneous problem-solving sessions. The remote staff get Slack messages. They join Zoom calls where three people in a conference room are sharing one microphone while two people at home are trying to lip-read on a 13-inch screen. One group is at the campfire. The other group is in the dark.

Building a Bigger Circle

The fix isn't to force everyone back to the office. That solves the proximity problem by eliminating flexibility, which creates a different set of resentments. The fix is to design your hybrid setup so that no one is consistently in the dark.

A few things that help. First, if a meeting has even one remote participant, everyone joins from their own screen. No more conference rooms where four people sit together and two people are tiny squares on a TV. When everyone is in the same format, the playing field levels.

Second, document the hallway conversations. If a decision gets made over coffee, it doesn't count until it's shared with the whole team. This sounds bureaucratic, but it's actually just fair. The remote person who finds out three days later that the registration timeline changed isn't going to feel like a valued teammate. They're going to feel like an afterthought.

Third, check your patterns. Look at who gets assigned to the most interesting projects. Look at who gets mentioned in leadership conversations. If those people are disproportionately the ones you see in person, proximity bias is operating whether you intend it or not.

The campfire works because everyone can see the flame and everyone can see each other. The moment you let half your team sit in the dark, you haven't saved the campfire. You've split it into a stage and an audience. And audiences don't build culture. Circles do.

About the Author

Matt Kaufman has spent 40 years in summer camp as a camper, counselor, and director, studying what makes people belong, grow, and thrive. He writes about intentional community, leadership, and the intersection of technology and human connection.

Connect with Matt:

• Instagram: @mattlovescamp

• LinkedIn: Matt Kaufman

• Website: ilove.camp

Books by Matt Kaufman:

• The Campfire Effect: How to Engineer Belonging in a Disconnected World

• The Summer Camp MBA: 50 Leadership Lessons from Camp to Career