What is proximity bias and how do you avoid it?

Nobody meant anything by it. That is exactly what makes proximity bias so hard to spot, and why good intentions alone don’t fix it. This post explains what it is, why it catches fair managers, and the small changes that take it out of your week.

What is proximity bias?

Proximity bias is the habit of favouring the people you see in person over the people you mostly see on a screen. It isn’t usually a decision. It’s a drift in who gets the opportunities, the credit and the benefit of the doubt.

Writing in Harvard Business Review, Gleb Tsipursky describes it as the way people in power tend to “treat workers who are physically closer to them more favorably.” He links it to an old assumption that people working remotely get less done than people in the office.

An SHRM article by Arlene S. Hirsch lists common examples. The first is “evaluating the work of onsite employees more highly than remote employees,” regardless of objective performance. The others are just as familiar: giving the most interesting projects and development to people on site, and leaving remote people out of important meetings or not drawing them in on calls.

Notice that none of these needs a bad manager. Each one only needs a manager who is busy, and a room with some people in it and some people not.

Why does proximity bias happen to fair managers?

Because it runs on habit, not intent. The people you see get more small moments with you: a word in the corridor, a quick question after a meeting, a coffee where a half-formed idea gets shared. Those moments add up to trust, and trust is what you draw on when you hand out the next opportunity.

There is a second, quieter cause. In-person time often carries the parts of management that matter most for careers. In Gallup’s 2022 study of hybrid work, Ben Wigert and Jessica White note that hybrid employees are “not spending much WFH time with their manager.” They warn that feedback, recognition and development may end up mostly happening in person. If your best coaching happens on office days, the people who are in less often get less of it, without anyone choosing that.

So the fix isn’t to feel guilty or to promise yourself you’ll be fairer. Promises don’t change where the small moments happen. Systems do.

Does working from home really hurt someone’s career?

It doesn’t have to. The best evidence suggests that when hybrid workers fall behind, the cause is usually how they are judged, not what they deliver.

The strongest study here is a randomised trial published in Nature in 2024 by Nicholas Bloom, Ruobing Han and James Liang. They followed 1,612 employees at a Chinese technology company for six months, with some randomly assigned to work from home two days a week. Hybrid working reduced quit rates “by one-third”. The researchers found that hybrid working did not affect performance grades over the next two years, and “no evidence for a difference in promotions” overall or for any major group of employees.

Two details in that paper are worth holding on to. First, this was a company that set the hybrid scheme up deliberately and evaluated it, so it shows what is possible, not what happens everywhere. Second, the 395 managers in the trial changed their minds. Before the experiment, they thought hybrid working would hurt productivity, by 2.6% on average. Afterwards, they thought it helped, by 1.0%. Their view moved once they saw the results.

That is the useful lesson for any manager. Your gut feeling about who is productive is shaped by who you see. The data may tell a different story, so look at the data.

What does proximity bias look like in a hybrid team?

Here is a hypothetical example. A product manager leads a team of seven. Four come into the office on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Two work mostly from home. One lives four hours ahead and joins the afternoon calls in their evening. The manager is thoughtful and well liked. Here is one month.

• Week one: a customer problem lands on a Wednesday. The manager talks it through with two people at the whiteboard, and they agree the fix. The notes go out on Friday. The engineer at home who knows that part of the product best sees them for the first time then. (Fairness.)
• Week two: in the weekly call, the manager asks “any thoughts?” The people in the room answer first, because they can see each other’s faces. The two at home stay quiet. The manager takes the silence to mean agreement. (Connection.)
• Week three: priorities change after a conversation over lunch. The people who were there adjust straight away. The colleague four hours ahead keeps working on the old priority for two more days, because the change was never written down. (Clarity.)
• Week four: the only time the whole team overlaps is one hour a day, and three recurring meetings fill most of it. There’s no slot left for the one-to-ones with the people at home, so two of them slip. (Overlap time.)

No single moment here is unfair on purpose. But by the end of the month, the people in the office have shaped a decision, been heard, kept up with a priority and had their one-to-ones. The others have not. When the next stretch project comes up, the manager will naturally think of someone who “has been really involved lately”.

The fix isn’t a speech about inclusion. It’s four small changes: write the decision down the same day and ask the expert at home before it’s final, call on people by name on calls, put priority changes in writing, and protect part of the overlap hour for one-to-ones.

How do you avoid proximity bias as a manager?

You change the default, so that fairness doesn’t depend on remembering. A handful of simple rules does more than any amount of good intent.

Make one place the place where decisions live. If a decision is made at a desk, it isn’t final until it’s written in the team channel, with a chance for others to add to it. That one habit removes most of the gap between people who were there and people who weren’t.

Share the criteria before you share the choice. Before you hand out a project, say what it needs and who might fit. Then decide. When people can see how you chose, they are far less likely to think it came down to who was nearby.

Keep a simple record. Every month, jot down who got stretch work, public praise and early news. Mark who was in the office that week. It takes ten minutes and it will show you a pattern long before your team points it out.

Run meetings as if everyone is remote. If one person is on a screen, everyone joins the call from their own laptop, or at least the room has a proper camera and someone watches the chat. Call on people at home first now and then, so the room doesn’t always set the direction.

Give remote people your best management time, not your leftovers. Gallup’s point about feedback and development happening in person is a warning. Book coaching conversations for people at home with the same care you give office days, and don’t let them be the first thing to move.

Is fairness the only thing that matters in a remote team?

No. Fairness between remote and office is one of four things we look at, and they feed each other. A team can be perfectly fair and still struggle if people feel cut off, aren’t sure what matters, or never have time together.

Connection is whether people feel part of the team, not just on it. Gallup’s data shows how common the problem is: in its ranking of hybrid work challenges, 32% chose “feel less connected to organization’s culture,” second only to access to resources and equipment. Connection doesn’t need more social events. It needs regular one-to-ones where the other person does most of the talking, and a manager who notices when someone goes quiet. If those meetings feel like a box-ticking exercise, read why one-to-ones feel like a waste of time.

Clarity is whether people know what good looks like without having to ask. In an office, people pick up priorities by overhearing them. Remotely, if it isn’t written down, it doesn’t exist for half the team.

Overlap time is the hours when everyone is online together, and how you spend them. The SHRM article notes that time zones can make proximity bias worse, because opportunities and announcements land when some people aren’t at their desks. Overlap hours are precious, so don’t fill them with status updates that could be written. If you want to see how much of your team’s shared time goes on recurring calls, add up the meeting tax or read how much recurring meetings cost your team.

Can you overcorrect for proximity bias?

Yes. Some managers respond by treating office time as suspect, cancelling in-person days or avoiding casual chats with whoever is nearby. That trades one unfairness for another, and it throws away the real value of being together.

The aim isn’t to give everyone identical days. It’s to make sure that the things that shape careers, such as decisions, information, stretch work and coaching, reach everyone whether or not they were in the room. Enjoy the whiteboard session. Just write it up the same day and ask the people who weren’t there what you missed.

How fair is your remote team right now?

Most managers of remote or hybrid teams are strong in some of these areas and weak in others. Knowing which two are weakest tells you where a small change will matter most.

Remote Team Check is a free test built for exactly that. It takes about 4 minutes, needs no sign-up, and your answers stay in your browser. You answer 12 questions and get a remote team score out of 100. It looks at four areas, connection, clarity, fairness between remote and office, and overlap time, and shows your two weakest, each with one move to try.

For now, you rate yourself. A team version, where your team answers anonymously, is coming, and that is usually the more honest view, because proximity bias is easier to see from the outside. Either way, the score isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a starting point for deciding what to change first.

If you want a wider read on how you lead, try The 42 Test. You’ll find more tests and posts for leading through moments like this on the moments that matter page, including how to find out what your team really thinks of you when you rarely see them.

Proximity bias rarely shows up as one unfair decision. It shows up as a hundred small moments that happened to land on whoever was nearby. You won’t catch them all by trying harder. You catch them by deciding, in advance, how decisions, news and opportunities reach everyone.