Imagine a world where your manager, seated in a glass cabin, gauges your productivity by the number of hours you spend at your desk. Sounds archaic, right? Yet new evidence shows that’s precisely how managers tend to evaluate their employees, systematically undervaluing the productivity of hybrid and remote workers. This proximity bias is the ghost in the machine, the unseen hand pulling organizations back to outdated office-centric models, despite the well-documented benefits of remote and hybrid work.
Nick Bloom, the foremost scholar on hybrid and remote work, recently published two studies that explain why many companies have reneged on flexible work policies and demonstrate the failure of managers to correctly assess the performance of hybrid and remote workers.
