Imagine a world where your manager sits in a glass cabin and measures your productivity by the time you spend at your desk. Sounds ancient, right? Yet new evidence suggests that this is exactly how managers evaluate their workers, systematically underestimating the productivity of hybrid and remote workers. This proximity bias is a ghost in the machine, an invisible hand pulling organizations back to an outdated office-centric model, despite the well-documented benefits of remote and hybrid working.
Nick BloomThe foremost scholars on hybrid and remote work recently published two studies that explain why many companies are violating flexible work policies and demonstrate that managers fail to properly assess the performance of hybrid and remote workers.
These findings confirm my own observations Work with clients Help them figure out their Hybrid working mode: Manager training is the biggest barrier to organizations effectively achieving hybrid work performance and a major factor in the continued increase in office hours.
How do managers evaluate remote workers?
In the first study, Bloom collaborated with other scholars at Stanford University to study call center employees and their work at a Nasdaq-listed company with 16,000 employees. Research results have been published Developed by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). The company’s top executives wanted to have call center employees working remotely as leadership looked to reduce office rental costs and improve retention. However, leadership is concerned about allowing work from home (WFH), away from direct supervision, which they fear may lead to slacking off.
Many call center employees want to work from home to save commuting time and costs, but are concerned about the potential for isolation and worry that working from home will reduce their chances for advancement. So the company teamed up with Stanford University to conduct a randomized controlled trial. Call center workers have the opportunity to apply for work-from-home arrangements. After applying, researchers randomly selected half of the applicants to work from home, while the other half continued to work in an office environment. The company has not trained managers to supervise employees working from home or made any other significant changes to accommodate a work-from-home setup.
The academics selected several relevant productivity indicators for this experiment: hours worked per shift, calls per minute, and managers’ assessments of performance. Additionally, they measure retention and satisfaction metrics to provide a holistic view.
In nine months, WFH Group’s performance grew strongly by 13%. Digging deeper into the numbers, 9% of the increase was due to fewer breaks and sick days leading to more hours worked per shift, while the remaining 4% came from more calls per minute, most likely due to a quieter work environment.
How is the quality? The academics used two quality measures: conversion rates and weekly logging scores. They calculate conversion rates based on the percentage of calls received that result in an order, and the weekly score is derived from 1% of calls randomly assessed by an external monitoring team. The figures for the WFH group and the in-service group were similar, indicating that the WFH group performed better at the same quality level.
Hopes of reducing employee turnover also proved to be true: 35% turnover for the on-site team compared to just 17% for the work-from-home team.
However, managers’ performance evaluations go in the opposite direction. WFH reduces promotion rates that are conditional on performance. In other words, based on the increased productivity of the WFH group, their promotion rate should be much higher than what scholars have observed over the past nine months. Unfortunately, without management training in evaluating the performance of remote employees, managers adopted a natural and intuitive “out of sight, out of mind” attitude, underestimating WFH Group’s higher productivity.
Academics have conducted focus groups and report hearing anecdotal evidence of this from employees and managers. In fact, some employees are choosing to return to the office to avoid what they see as a work-from-home promotion penalty.
It’s not just peer-reviewed studies that have produced such disappointing results. Many surveys show the same results.For example, a poll 200 C-suite executives found that 41% believe remote workers are less likely to be promoted.
What about hybrid workers?
Nick Bloom runs again study, this time focusing on hybrid work, with 1,612 employees from two divisions in a larger company with 35,000 employees. Employees with even-numbered birthdays are assigned a full-time, Monday-to-Friday, 9-to-5 schedule, while employees with odd-numbered birthdays receive a flexible hybrid schedule. Likewise, the company has not made any substantive changes to accommodate hybrid work or train managers to evaluate hybrid work performance.
The researchers used two main metrics to assess productivity: the number of lines of code written by programmers and managers’ assessments of performance. Additionally, research goes beyond productivity to measure retention, engagement and sick days to capture the overall impact of work patterns.
What did they find? Lines of code increased by 4.4% in the hybrid workgroup. This is not surprising, as this statistic is consistent with the productivity gains of hybrid work, as shown below: Other research.
It’s not just a matter of productivity. Employee retention in the mixed group jumped 33%, sick days were reduced, and job satisfaction increased significantly.
But there is a small problem – management satisfaction is low.In addition, in order to Quote “We found that mixed treatment had no significant impact on employees’ performance evaluations or promotion rates,” the researchers said. So while the hybrid work model increased productivity by 4.4%, management evaluations were not affected.
This constant lens through which managers evaluate employee performance in hybrid environments reveals significant oversights. Traditional parameters and biases persist, masking the actual productivity gains achieved in hybrid work settings.
Likewise, the fact that hybrid working models have no significant impact on promotion rates is a clear indication of a systemic problem. The traditional office-centric model, with its easily observable work dynamics, has long been the blueprint for management evaluation. While the shift to hybrid working has been productive, it appears to have hit a roadblock in translating productivity into recognized performance and subsequent promotions.
The essence of the problem boils down to proximity bias – the inherent belief that physical presence and visibility in an office environment is synonymous with productivity and commitment. This bias isn’t just a misjudgment, it’s a career hindrance in a world where remote and hybrid work models are becoming the norm rather than the exception.
Assessing the Productivity Doom Loop
Given that remote and hybrid workers are more productive, it’s not surprising that managers give them lower scores than they should.After all they didn’t get anything train Manage mixed work or evaluate employee performance.
Companies like Meta, Amazon, and others have backtracked on their promises of flexible work policies and failed to provide their managers with effective training on hybrid and remote management. Managers naturally resent flexible work policies and rate remote workers’ performance poorly. Company leadership got these unsatisfactory signals from managers and decided to reverse its flexible work policy. This doom cycle could have been avoided if managers knew how to manage hybrid and remote workers well.
Managers need to learn how to effectively measure the productivity of hybrid and remote workers and move away from typical “management by walking around.”Even before the outbreak, widespread Research have proved this importance of transition Stay away from overall annual performance reviews. Today, managers have no reason to persist with such dysfunctional management techniques.
The best managers already have one-on-ones with team members on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. These meetings should only include performance review elements.
Agree with each team member on three to five weekly or bi-weekly performance goals, preferably with the goals clever Weekly (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) goals. Depending on their role, these goals may vary and include short-term tactical goals (schedule 7 customer visits), process goals (maintain a 3.5+ on customer feedback surveys), larger tasks (complete preliminary research and draft a report outline), or a collaborative assignment (meeting with Bob for half an hour each week to coach him). The day before the meeting, ask team members to send a brief report to their manager describing their progress, the challenges they faced, how they overcame them, a self-assessment, and some goals for the next week.
When the two meet, the manager evaluates team members’ goal achievement, coaches team members on how to solve any challenges they face, revise any goals that need adjustment, and confirm or revise performance reviews. Goals, performance reviews and any comments are written to a shared document and help inform the more formal annual performance review.
This micro-assessment ecosystem provides employees with a clear mirror of performance, provides psychological safety, and prevents overwork and burnout, which are often byproducts of hybrid or remote settings. It is the catalyst for developing rapport between managers and employees and is the cornerstone of employee retention and career advancement.Gallup poll Research shows that 75% of employee turnover is largely due to a poor relationship with their direct manager.
For managers, it’s a way to keep their finger on the pulse of each team member’s productivity. It can also serve as an antidote to proximity bias. With real-time performance insights, managers can make informed decisions—whether it’s project assignments, promotions, or salary increases. Additionally, it serves as a radar for identifying and correcting performance issues early in the cycle, ensuring not only employee success but collective team and organizational success, and saving managers significant time resolving employee issues.
until the manager gets train They need and deserve it, but they will continue to be dissatisfied with flexible working and underestimate the performance of hybrid and remote workers. This intuitive proximity bias cannot be eliminated or ignored – it is the powerful force behind all the big shifts in flexible working and rigid, top-down RTO mandates.
Gleb Zipulski,PhD. (aka “The Office Whisperer”), helps technology and finance executives drive collaboration, innovation and retention in hybrid work.He serves as CEO of boutique Future of Work Consultants Disaster prevention expert.He is the best-selling author of seven books, including Never go by your gut and Lead hybrid and remote teams.His expertise comes from over 20 years of experience consult For Fortune 500 companies (from Aflac to Xerox) and More than 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and The Ohio State University.
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