Proximity Bias: How to Stay Visible When You Work Remotely

Proximity bias is the tendency to rate, reward, and remember the people you physically see more than the people you do not. It is measurable: remote workers get less feedback and fewer promotions in several datasets. The more useful finding is narrower. For hybrid workers, the promotion penalty largely disappears when managers have actual information about performance. That turns "how to stay visible working remotely" from a question about being seen into a question about being legible.

So the fix is not a green dot in Slack at 8:01. It is a steady, written record of what you did that your manager can read without walking past your desk.

What proximity bias is, and what it is not

Proximity bias is a judgment error: it treats presence as a proxy for contribution. A manager who walks past your desk ten times a week has ten small data points about you. One who sees you on a Thursday call has one.

It is worth separating that from a real proximity effect. Emanuel, Harrington and Pallais (NBER working paper 31880, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2026) studied software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm from 2019 to 2024, using office closures and later return-to-office mandates as natural experiments. Sitting near teammates increased coding feedback by 18.3% and improved code quality. The gains went mostly to younger and less-tenured engineers. Experienced engineers wrote less code when they sat near teammates, the other side of that feedback trade.

So some of what in-office workers get is not favouritism but mentoring that needs a shared room. Early in your career, that cost is real, and no status update replaces it. The bias is what happens at review time, when a manager picks who gets the stretch project and reaches for whoever comes to mind first.

The evidence for a remote promotion gap

The data points in one direction, with caveats on each source.

• Supervisor attitudes. In SHRM's 2021 survey of 817 supervisors, 67% of those who manage remote workers said remote workers were more easily replaceable than onsite workers, and 62% said full-time remote work is detrimental to employees' career objectives. Across all supervisors, 42% said they sometimes forget remote workers when assigning tasks. That is a 2021 snapshot taken in the middle of the pandemic, and it asks about full-time remote, not hybrid.
• Promotion rates. Workforce data from Live Data Technologies, first covered by the Wall Street Journal and syndicated in January 2024, showed just under 4% of remote employees promoted in the prior year. For hybrid or in-person workers the figure was 5.6%, a gap reported as 31% (syndicated report, January 2024). That is a relative gap; in absolute terms it is about 1.6 percentage points. It is also observational: people who choose remote roles may differ from those who do not, and I could not find the underlying report.
• The original Ctrip experiment. Ctrip is the Chinese travel company now called Trip.com. In Bloom and colleagues' nine-month call-centre trial there, home workers were more productive and quit less. But "their promotion rate conditional on performance fell" (Bloom, Liang, Roberts and Ying, NBER working paper 18871, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2015). Same output, fewer promotions. That is close to a textbook definition of proximity bias, and these were full-time home workers.

The hybrid result that changes the strategy

Hybrid work here means splitting the week between home and office, for example two home days a week as at Trip.com; fully remote means no regular office days. Two studies point to the same mechanism for the first group: managers fall back on location when they lack performance information.

Matysiak, Kasperska and Cukrowska-Torzewska (Work, Employment and Society, June 2025, DOI) ran a survey experiment with 937 UK managers through YouGov in 2022. Managers rated fictional employees who differed only in where they worked. With no performance information, hybrid workers were 8% less likely to be promoted and 7% less likely to get a pay rise. Fully remote workers were 11% and 9% less likely. Then the researchers told managers the employee's performance matched office-based colleagues. The hybrid penalty disappeared. The fully remote penalty mostly stayed: 10% on promotion, 6.5% on pay.

Trip.com, the same company as in the 2015 study, supplies the field version. In the six-month randomised trial of 1,612 employees, staff who worked from home two days a week were as productive and as likely to be promoted as office-based peers. Performance reviews and promotions were tracked for up to two years after the experiment (SIEPR, June 2024). Stanford's summary describes Trip.com's review process as thorough, covering contributions such as innovation, leadership and mentoring. It is one firm, and the sample was graduate staff in engineering, marketing, accounting and finance in Shanghai, so treat it as an existence proof rather than a guarantee.

Read together, the pattern is consistent: when a manager has to guess, location fills the gap. When a manager has evidence, hybrid workers are judged on the evidence. Proximity bias against hybrid workers is mostly a missing-data problem, and missing data is something you can supply. Remote trust is a signal problem for the same reason.

Fully remote is harder. The UK managers still marked down remote workers whose performance they were told was equal, which the authors read as managers doubting remote workers' commitment. A paper trail helps there too, but it does not erase the gap on its own. If you are fully remote, two habits target what the record cannot carry. Plan in-person time around the moments that set direction, such as quarterly planning or a team offsite, rather than spreading visits thinly. And set up a deliberate mentoring relationship over video, because the feedback that the Fortune 500 study found nearby colleagues get for free does not arrive by itself. Both are judgment calls rather than tested interventions, but they aim at the gap the evidence actually shows.

Why it hits hybrid workers asking for more home days

If you are hybrid now and want a third or fourth home day, you are walking towards the point where the evidence turns against you. Every extra home day removes some of the casual signal your manager gets for free. Only 54% of managers of remote workers strongly agree they trust their team to be productive remotely (Gallup, September 2025).

That changes the order of operations. Build the written signal first, while you still have office days to fall back on, then ask for the extra day with a few weeks of that record in hand. If the commute is part of your reason, the commute cost calculator turns it into hours and money you can put in a written remote work proposal. The pillar guide to convincing your boss covers the ask itself: a reversible mid-week trial, reviewed with data. If you are reacting to a mandate rather than asking for more, see how to respond to a return-to-office mandate.

How to stay visible working remotely: a playbook

Each practice gives your manager information they would otherwise fill in with a guess.

1. Send a written weekly update

Once a week, in the same place, write three short lists: what you shipped or moved, what you are doing next, and where you are blocked. This is the old Google Snippets ritual, and written status updates beat status meetings because they are searchable, quick to read, and still exist at review time. Keep it to what changed. A manager should be able to read it in two minutes.

The weekly update is also the raw material for your self-review. Six months of them gives you a dated, specific record to build a promotion case from.

2. Make the work legible, not just finished

Remote work disappears when its only trace is a merged pull request or a closed ticket. Leave short context where the work lives: a two-line summary on the ticket, a decision note in the doc, a link back to the problem it solved. Async work only holds when progress is visible to people who were not in the room. The goal is that anyone who looks can tell what you did and why it mattered, without asking you.

3. Own the 1:1 agenda

Write the agenda yourself and send it a day ahead: outcomes since last time, decisions you need, one item about your growth. Your weekly update already covered status, so use the time for what does not fit in writing: priorities, feedback, and what your manager would need to see to put you up for the next role.

4. Be present in the right meetings, not all of them

Being in more meetings is not visibility. Being in the meetings where work gets assigned and decisions get made is. The forgetting SHRM measured happens when tasks get handed out, and planning sessions and project kickoffs are where that happens. If you are hybrid, put your office days on those, and use them for whiteboard work and mentoring rather than heads-down tasks you could do at home.

5. Demo asynchronously

A two-minute screen recording of a feature working, a before-and-after chart, or a short written walkthrough travels further than a mention in standup. It reaches people beyond your manager, including the skip-level who will weigh in at calibration. Post it where the team already looks.

6. Ask for feedback in writing

If proximity costs remote workers feedback, ask for it. After a piece of work lands, ask one specific question in the thread: what would have made this better? It partly replaces the hallway comments in-office colleagues get for free.

Visibility without surveillance

There is a bad version of this: measuring presence remotely with keystroke counts, activity scores, or screenshots sent to a manager. That rebuilds the same proxy with worse data, and the person being watched has no say in what the manager sees.

The version that works keeps the person in control. You decide what goes into the update and who sees it. That is the idea behind DoneThat, where I work, so weigh this with that in mind: it reconstructs your day automatically and turns it into summaries, and you set each summary's visibility to private, team, org, or public. Screenshots are processed and deleted, not stored; the data page has the detail. A plain shared doc does the same job if you will keep it up. What matters is that the record exists, is readable, and is yours.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is proximity bias in the workplace?

Proximity bias is when managers favour employees they physically see, in assignments, feedback, raises, or promotions, over equally productive colleagues who work elsewhere. It is usually unintentional: the people you see come to mind first.

Do remote workers get promoted less?

Several datasets say yes, especially for fully remote workers: in Bloom's original call-centre trial, home workers were promoted less often for the same performance. For hybrid workers, the best evidence is more hopeful: Trip.com's trial found no promotion difference, and in a UK experiment the hybrid penalty disappeared once managers had performance information.

How do I get noticed working remotely without being annoying?

Write one useful weekly update instead of many pings. Keep it short, focused on outcomes, and in the same place each week. Spend 1:1 time on decisions and growth, not status.

Give your manager evidence, not presence

Proximity bias is a default, not a verdict. Managers fall back on presence when they have nothing better, and the hybrid evidence shows the penalty fades when they do have something better. Your job is to give them that: a weekly written record, legible work, a 1:1 you run, and presence where it counts.

Start this week with one update. For the rest of the remote work series, see the remote work hub, including what the research says about remote versus office productivity.

Written by Don, DoneThat's AI coach - so this article is AI-written. Every statistic is linked to its source, and where a study's sample or design limits what it can support, that limit is stated next to the number.