Most leaders believe they evaluate their teams based on results. However, research suggests they often evaluate them based on visibility. The gap between those two things is proximity bias, and it's one of the more consequential interpersonal challenges facing managers today.

Proximity bias is the tendency to view employees who are physically present more favorably than those who are not. It's not a character flaw. It's a cognitive shortcut rooted in what psychologists call the mere-exposure effect: we tend to trust and value people and things we encounter more frequently. In a workplace context, that means the person sitting three desks away registers as more committed, more capable, and more promotable than the person doing equivalent work from another location, without either person being aware that the assessment is happening.

For leaders managing hybrid teams, understanding this bias is not optional. It's a core interpersonal skill.

What the data shows

The career consequences of proximity bias are measurable and significant.

An analysis of more than two million white-collar workers found that remote employees are 31% less likely to be promoted than their in-office or hybrid counterparts. Remote employees are also 38% less likely to receive bonuses than colleagues doing equivalent roles in person. Research from Owl Labs report found that 55% of employees believe their managers view office workers as harder working and more trustworthy than remote colleagues.

What makes these numbers particularly striking is that they persist even when leaders believe they are being fair. In the same Owl Labs research, 96% of executives admitted they are more likely to notice contributions made in the office than those completed remotely, even when they reported treating both groups equally.

A peer-reviewed study published in Work, Employment and Society, involving nearly 1,000 UK managers, ran a controlled experiment. When managers were given no performance data about a hybrid or remote worker, those employees faced significantly lower probabilities of promotion and salary increase. When managers have objective performance data showing the remote employee performed identically to an in-office peer, the effects of proximity bias appear to be significantly reduced. The bias was not rooted in actual performance differences. It was rooted in the absence of visible data to replace the proximity signal.

The four places it shows up

Proximity bias doesn't express itself only in promotion decisions. It tends to accumulate across several dimensions of how leaders manage their teams.

Project assignments. High-visibility projects often go to people the leader sees regularly. This happens through informal conversations, off-hand mentions in hallways, and the general pattern of who a leader thinks about when an opportunity comes up. Remote employees are less likely to appear in that mental shortlist, not because they're less capable, but because they're less present.

Mentorship and development. Informal mentoring, the kind that happens organically over coffee or after a meeting, disproportionately benefits people who are physically close to senior leaders. Remote employees receive less of this, including less mentorship for women specifically, according to research on hybrid workplace dynamics.

Performance perception. Visible busyness gets mistaken for productivity. An employee who is in the office, visibly engaged, and present in meetings creates a strong impression even if their output is equivalent to a remote colleague who doesn't produce the same visible signal.

Informal influence. Access to decision-makers outside of formal meetings, the ability to raise a concern in passing or get early read on a decision, accrues to people who share physical space with those decision-makers. Over time, this shapes whose perspective gets heard and whose gets filtered.

What leaders can do about it

The research finding that matters most here is also the most actionable: when managers have objective performance data, proximity bias largely disappears. The implication is that the solution is not to ask leaders to override their instincts but to ensure their decisions are grounded in data rather than impression.

Several practices follow from this:

• Audit your last six months of decisions on promotions, project assignments, and high-visibility opportunities. Look at whether in-office employees received a disproportionate share. If the pattern is there, that's useful information regardless of how you thought you were making those decisions.

• Standardise how you document contributions. If remote employees' work is less visible by default, the discipline of recording what people accomplish, in writing, on a shared system, levels the playing field more than any amount of conscious intention to be fair.

• Structure how you make promotion decisions. A process that requires written evidence of contributions, reviewed by more than one person, is more resistant to proximity bias than one that relies on a manager's gut read of who is "ready."

• Distribute relationship-building deliberately. If you have informal one-to-ones with in-office team members, replicate them intentionally with remote colleagues. The informal relationship capital that builds naturally through proximity has to be built intentionally when proximity isn't shared.

The case for making a deliberate choice

Some teams and leaders have resolved the proximity bias problem not by managing around it but by eliminating the condition that creates it. Companies that have made an explicit decision about how they work, either fully in-person or genuinely distributed, don't face the same management challenge as those caught in an unresolved hybrid middle.

SF-based startup teams that committed to full in-person models, the kind looking at a startup office in San Francisco, made a specific interpersonal choice: the entire team shares the same physical conditions, and the proximity signal applies equally to everyone. The bias still exists but it no longer creates a two-tier dynamic between people with different levels of access.

This isn't an argument for any particular model. Companies that built genuinely distributed cultures, where everyone is remote and the playing field is flat in a different way, have also resolved the structural problem even if they face different challenges around connection and culture. The model that reliably produces proximity bias is the unresolved middle: some people in the office most of the time, others remote most of the time, and a leadership team that hasn't explicitly addressed what that means for how decisions get made.

Regardless of whether an organisation chooses a fully remote, fully in-person, or hybrid model, no structure can completely eliminate the influence of human judgement. Ultimately, reducing proximity bias depends on leaders recognising how their own perceptions shape the decisions they make.

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Conclusion: The interpersonal skill underneath all of this

Proximity bias is ultimately a problem of self-awareness. Leaders who don't know they have it can't correct for it. The interpersonal skill that matters most here isn't a technique or a process. It's the habit of questioning whether the impressions you're acting on are based on what people have done or how often you've seen them do it.

Most leaders, when they think about it honestly, know the difference between an employee they feel good about because of consistent, visible performance and one they feel good about because of regular, comfortable contact. The gap between those two things is where proximity bias lives, and closing it is one of the more important things a leader managing a mixed team can do.

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