Business leaders fear workplace flexibility could encourage proximity bias

Leaders are concerned that employees choosing to work from home may feel excluded from opportunities to progress, leading to proximity bias. 

New research carried out by LinkedIn shows a significant shift in work models with more companies now looking to offer hybrid (56 per cent) or fully remote working (10 per cent).

Despite this, leaders share their concerns that employees working from home may feel left out of promotion or career decisions (35 per cent), leading to the rise of proximity bias – where people positively favour employees who they regularly see.

This is also a fear shared by many employees with almost half (44 per cent) believing that people who choose to work from the office are more likely to be favoured by bosses or senior management.

Two in five (39 per cent) think that working from home could negatively impact their career due to less face-time with their boss, and a third believe that being in the office is ultimately better for their progression.

Becky Schnauffer, Senior Director at LinkedIn, described this is as a period of transition where it is “imperative” for businesses to ensure that all employees feel included, regardless of their location.

Generally, business leaders feel this is a problem which they can tackle (76 per cent) through making everyone feel included regardless of their location.

Specifically, they plan to encourage managers to lead with empathy and trust, avoid forming biases based on where people choose to work (49 per cent) and establishing new behaviours and etiquette (39 per cent).

The majority (78 per cent) of executives say they also intend to introduce training courses to help people work effectively in flexible working environments.

The top skills leaders say are most important to leading in this new world of work are communication (62 per cent), trust (55 per cent), integrity (47 per cent) and inclusive leadership (44 per cent).

Positively, many business leaders believe enabling greater flexibility will allow them to create a more diverse workforce with over half (54 per cent) believing this way of working will assist those who need it the most, including people with caring responsibilities.

Ms. Schnauffer further continued:

Leaders and managers will need to work closely with HR teams to facilitate the appropriate training and guidelines to ensure career progression is centred around performance, and not location.

Managers will also need to work with their teams to build a culture centred around trust and communication to help distributed teams work effectively together.

This was echoed by Dr. Ben Laker who warned against over-utilising online meetings as a way of creating connection between staff split over the office and working from home:

Since transitioning to hybrid and remote working models, many leaders are directing their employees to engage in frequent facetime on video platforms to compensate for the loss of physical connectivity.

While this sentiment is somewhat endearing, scheduling countless online meetings is indicative of the need for people to be present and seen.

Not only does it have the potential to fuel proximity bias, it is also causing a rise of “zoom fatigue” – a condition neuropsychologists regard as a significant contributor to technostress.

*LinkedIn utilised data from  250+ C-level executives in the UK – from organisations with 1,000+ employees and £250+ million annual turnover – during 4th to 24th August 2021 (YouGov) and responses from 1,000+ people in the UK (Censuswide) to understand both their responses to the future of work.