Proximity bias is a quick fix to improve fairness.
Think about the last time you gave someone a stretch assignment. A chance to lead a project, represent the team, take on something that would stretch them. Now think about where that person sits.
If they’re in the office with you most of the time, it probably wasn’t a coincidence that you picked them.
Proximity bias is the unconscious tendency to perceive employees who are physically visible to us as more productive, more committed, and more promotable than those who aren’t. It’s not malicious. It’s not even deliberate. It’s just how human attention works, we notice what’s in front of us, and we reward it. The data backs this up: an early study by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom found that despite outperforming their in-office counterparts on productivity, remote workers were promoted at a lower rate, a finding that has since been reinforced across multiple research contexts (https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/06/hybrid-work-is-a-win-win-win-for-companies-workers).
The problem is that in most organisations today, a significant portion of your team isn’t in front of you. They’re at home, in another city, or in another country entirely. And if you’re managing across Asia Pacific, that’s not the exception, it’s the norm. Most managers in this region are leading people across multiple locations, time zones, and work arrangements simultaneously.
Which means proximity bias isn’t just a hybrid work problem. It’s a structural inequality that quietly shapes careers, and most managers don’t see it happening.
What It Actually Looks Like
The bias shows up in ways that feel completely natural in the moment, which is exactly what makes it hard to catch.
Informal conversations are the most obvious example. The hallway chat. The coffee run. Poking your head over someone’s desk to see how a project is going. These feel like nothing, small, spontaneous moments. But they’re where relationships get built, talent gets noticed, and micro-opportunities get distributed. The person working remotely or two countries away doesn’t get any of that. Not because you excluded them, but because the moments never arose.
It shows up in meetings too. In a hybrid room where most people are physically present, the remote participants are working against a structural disadvantage. It’s harder to hold the floor, harder to read the room, harder to be remembered as the person who made the sharp observation. The people in the room command the space more easily, and that registers, even subconsciously, when it comes time to think about who’s ready for more.
And it shows up in performance language. Words like “visible,” “proactive,” “available,” and “committed”, when you audit them honestly, often just mean I can see them. That’s not performance. That’s proximity.
It’s worth distinguishing proximity bias from a related pattern that often runs alongside it: affinity bias, which is the tendency to favour people who remind us of ourselves, same background, same communication style, same instincts about how work gets done. In distributed teams, the two tend to compound each other. The people who are physically close to you are often also the ones who share your context most readily, which makes them feel more familiar, more capable, and more ready. When you’re auditing your own patterns, it’s worth asking which of these is actually driving your instincts, because the corrective for each is slightly different.
What to Do About It
The managers who handle this best aren’t the ones who abolished the office or went fully remote. They’re the ones who consciously redesigned how they pay attention.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
Structure in what proximity gives you for free. In-person teams get informal check-ins, spontaneous feedback, and relationship-building moments automatically. Remote and distributed team members don’t. So schedule it deliberately. Build a few minutes of genuine conversation into the start of your one-on-ones. Block time for a check-in that has no agenda other than connection. One manager I know sends a coffee to a remote team member via delivery app before their meeting and sits down with their own drink at the same time. It sounds small. It works.
Design meetings for the minority. If two people are dialling in and eight are in the room, don’t run the meeting for the eight. Structured turn-taking, equal floor time, explicit invitations to contribute, these aren’t just courtesies, they’re corrections for a structural imbalance. Let remote team members chair meetings. Let them run the agenda. Create the visibility that the room would have handed them automatically if they were there.
Audit your promotion and opportunity patterns. Go back over the past year. Who did you put forward for stretch assignments? Who got invited into high-visibility projects? Who came to mind first when an opportunity arose? If the pattern skews heavily toward the people you see most, that’s the bias showing up in consequential decisions, not just small moments.
Separate visibility from performance when you speak about people. Before you write a performance comment or make a recommendation, ask yourself: am I describing what this person did, or am I describing how often I saw them? Those are different things, and conflating them is where the real career damage happens.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Remote and distributed employees are often learning something about their organisations that their managers never intended to teach them: physical distance from the person who controls their career means career distance too.
That’s the invisible harm in all of this. It’s not dramatic. Nobody announces it. It just accumulates, in the assignments that go to someone else, the feedback conversations that happen spontaneously for the person in the next desk but have to be scheduled for the person in another country, the promotions that consistently go to the people who were easiest to notice.
You can’t fix what you don’t see. So start by looking, at your patterns, your language, your instincts about who’s ready and who isn’t. The question worth sitting with after reading this is a simple one: what would you need to redesign about how you pay attention to give every person on your team, regardless of where they sit, a genuinely equal shot? If you want a concrete place to start: before your next team review or performance cycle, go back over your last five stretch assignment decisions and ask yourself honestly whether location played a role. That audit takes twenty minutes. What you find might surprise you.
