TREATING REMOTE EMPLOYEES FAIRLY IN A HYBRID WORKPLACE

Unconsciously favouring in-office employees—also called distance bias—can make top talent quit

- LAUREN DRELL

You’re leading a 4 PM meeting; five employees are with you in a conference room, and others have dialled in from elsewhere. You ask volunteers to write a report for the CEO, and several hands shoot up, including a few on Zoom. You tap the person sitting across from you because they’re the first one you see.

This, in a nutshell, is distance bias in the workplace: unintentionally favouring employees who are closest to you over those who are farther away. David Rock is Co-founder of the NeuroLeadership Institute, a consultancy that usesscience-based methods to help clients such as Netflix and Microsoft grow and develop soft skills. He told Toptal Insights that it’s based on the brain’s unconscious tendency to pay more attention to events and people nearest to us in both time and space.

While perfectly normal, distance bias—also called proximity bias—can have severe consequences for a business, including lower productivity, employee engagement and increased attrition. Bhushan Sethi, Principal, Joint Global Leader, People and Organization at PwC, stated, “The old adage pre-pandemic ‘out of sight, out of mind’ is real. We know that there is proximity bias in all aspects of our lives and work. We build relationships with people who are close to us. There’s a bias to doing that with people who are around us because it’s much easier.”

No matter how evolved a company’s leaders are, says Rock, everyone has bias. Distance bias is part of the brain’s network for deciding how important something is and how much to care about it. Orienting your attention to things closer to you is a shortcut that keeps you safe and focused and helps the brain quickly process and sort large amounts of information.