Have you ever heard of “proximity bias”?
It’s a new term to more than 50% of the people we meet.
It’s defined as a subconscious bias, a natural preference towards those closest to you, who you see physically more often than others. As the “return of the office” campaign picks up traction, many leaders fear that proximity bias will take root in hybrid teams, endangering productivity and performance.
In SWAY workshops, we see it as the top inhibiting factor toward a successful hybrid work environment. Instead we teach Location Inclusion as the direct opposite of proximity bias: it’s a positive mental model where you instinctively see no difference between person and place; it’s a mindset we work to achieve.
Many executives and management believe that hybrid work may create an unequal playing field. At SWAY, we believe that could only be true if the playing field was equal before.
Hybrid work has the opportunity to become the great equalizer, leveling the playing field for the many who were disadvantaged in a traditional setting.
Proximity bias may have served our ancestors well when they could only trust their tribe and should be understandably wary of strangers, but it has no place in the modern workplace.
The Data
In Slack’s Future Forum Pulse hybrid work survey, they found that 75% of executives would prefer to work from the office three or more days a week, while only 37% of non-executives would prefer to work on-site that frequently.
With executives setting that expectation for themselves, the potential for proximity bias is high and trickles down to everyone else in the office, regardless of its impact on productivity.
Some other key findings from the Future Forum Pulse:
78% of survey respondents want location flexibility, while 95% want schedule flexibility
72% of workers who are dissatisfied with their current level of flexibility say they will likely look for a new job next year
50% of working moms report they’d prefer to work from home most or all of the time, compared with 43% of working dads
3 Strategies to Prevent Proximity Bias and Encourage Location Inclusion
With a location inclusive mindset, we trust each other enough to get work done from anywhere during the hours we need to work. Team members get the recognition for their work whether or not they work in the office and stay late.
Transparent Communication
Clear, direct communication is the primary tactic to overcome proximity bias.
One of the principles we teach at SWAY is “I am a writer first, and documenting in written form is my first instinct.” Meaning, hybrid workers always document their work in writing, allowing the next person to know exactly where the project left off regardless of what time they log in for work.
This will look different for different teams: you might send a recap email to your manager at the end of the day with the tasks you completed or the status of each project, or maybe you have a “status” channel on Slack for the whole team to see these updates. If your team has a project management system, they should commit to using it consistently for better asynchronous work.
With transparent communication, the team no longer feels the need to check-in together at a specific time because you know what work has been completed already. While face-to-face meetings are always recommended for certain tasks, they can cause some proximity bias for the team members who aren’t available at that specific time.
Thoughtful Office Spaces
The next step in combating proximity bias is designing a thoughtful office space for the work you can only do physically together compared with when working together remotely.
In our Hybrid Worker Creed, we say “I consciously opt into flexible work and take personal responsibility for the effective design of my work environment and routine that enables me to bring my best self to work.”
Post-pandemic, working on tasks and routine meetings become a secondary task for in-person office spaces. The traditional office building is becoming a culture space, “providing workers with a social anchor, facilitating connections, enabling learning, and fostering unscripted, innovative collaboration, according to the Harvard Business Review.
We discussed Human-Centered Design a few months ago, showing that most employees would like to work from an office once or twice per week, and the employee’s needs are the center of the office redesign.
Management needs to encourage employees to use their in-office time for connections and socialization. Office designs focusing on conference rooms, seating areas, and a few small spaces for private conversations, prove that the space is NOT built for task work, but for collaborative work.
Outcome-Based Management
The biggest mental shift to combat proximity bias is transitioning management to an outcome-based mindset, compared with rewarding team members working at their desk until all hours of the night.
Managers can live out the principle, “I see no inter-dependency between person and place in how we create value at work.”
Even pre-pandemic, employees who stayed late were often praised compared with employees who arrived early (despite working the same amount of extra hours). Managers only remembered who was at their desks later than others, not who was there when they arrived.
Managers need to actively combat this mentality to survive in the hybrid workplace.
If the task is completed accurately by the deadline set, it should not matter what time of day the employee worked on it, or how few hours it took them. Employees should not be punished for their efficiency, and they should be free to choose if they want to complete extra work in their new-found time (of course, if they want a promotion, they should probably put in the extra effort!).
Setting Policies to Combat Proximity Bias
In Slack’s Future Forum, they suggest “ principles and guardrails” for hybrid work to actively combat proximity bias, suggesting a limit to the number of days per week spent on-site and a meeting policy that if one member dials into a call, they all dial in.
These policies will look different to every company and team structure, but we encourage you to remember a component of the SWAY “Hybrid Worker Creed”
“I believe that freedom of choice is the most powerful human motivator.”