The Proximity Tax: Why Great Work Is No Longer Enough to Get Promoted

Introduction

Results alone used to be enough. In most organizations today they are not even close. The gap between what people produce and what gets recognized has a name, and it is costing organizations the talent they can least afford to lose.

There is a version of the career contract most people were raised to believe in. Work hard, deliver results, build a reputation for reliability, and the organization will recognize what you contribute and reward it accordingly. It is a reasonable contract. It is also, according to a growing body of research, increasingly disconnected from how advancement actually works inside most organizations today.

The gap between what people produce and what gets recognized has always existed to some degree. What the shift to hybrid and remote work has done is make that gap measurable in a way it never was before. And what the data is showing is uncomfortable for leaders and employees alike: in most organizations, proximity is quietly functioning as a prerequisite for advancement that nobody put in writing and almost nobody is willing to name out loud.

What proximity bias actually is

Proximity bias is the cognitive tendency of leaders to favor, often unconsciously, the people they can physically see. It is rooted in one of the brain's most fundamental shortcuts: familiarity. The more frequently a person is seen, the more readily they come to mind, the more easily their contributions are noticed, and the more naturally they become part of the informal conversations and decisions where real organizational momentum gets made.

This is not a new phenomenon. Long before remote work existed, the person whose desk was near the manager's office had a different career trajectory than the person working equally hard three floors away. What has changed is the scale of the gap, and the degree to which research now allows us to see it clearly rather than dismiss it as anecdote.

A 2025 peer-reviewed study published in Work, Employment and Society, involving nearly 1,000 UK managers, found that even when managers knew a fully remote employee performed just as well as an on-site colleague, they were still less likely to recommend that person for promotion or a raise. The performance was identical. The judgment was not. And the factor that explained the difference was not output, not attitude, not potential. It was physical presence.

The numbers behind the gap

The research on this is extensive enough now that it can no longer be dismissed as the experience of a few unlucky remote workers. An analysis of more than two million white-collar workers found that remote employees are 31 percent less likely to be promoted than their in-office or hybrid peers. Fully remote workers are also 35 percent more likely to be laid off, not because their work is worse, but because managers find it easier to make difficult decisions about people they have not built in-person relationships with.

The Owl Labs State of Hybrid Work 2024 report found that 55 percent of employees say their managers view those in the office as harder working and more trustworthy than remote colleagues. A separate Envoy workplace survey found that 96 percent of executives admit they are more likely to notice contributions made in the office than those completed remotely, even when they believe they treat both groups equally.

That last figure is worth sitting with. The executives themselves acknowledge the bias while simultaneously believing it does not affect their judgment. That combination, awareness without correction, is what makes proximity bias so persistent and so difficult to address through good intentions alone.

Why this is a leadership problem before it is an employee problem

The framing of proximity bias as something employees need to manage individually misses the more important point. When an organization's advancement decisions are systematically influenced by physical proximity rather than demonstrated performance, the organization is not just being unfair to its remote workers. It is operating with a corrupted signal for identifying talent.

A Stanford Graduate School of Business study found that remote workers are less likely to be promoted even though they are on average 15 percent more productive than office workers. That means the people most likely to be overlooked for advancement are, on average, producing more. The organization is simultaneously undervaluing its highest contributors and reinforcing a system that rewards the wrong variable.

Research from Perceptyx found that 60 percent of executives and vice presidents believe employees in the physical workplace will have more career growth opportunities, compared to only 41 percent of individual contributors who hold the same view. That gap between what leaders believe and what employees experience is not a communication problem. It is a structural one. Leaders are setting the rules of a game they are not playing, from an office they return to every day, while the people most affected by those rules are operating in an environment where visibility is structurally harder to achieve.

The invisible tax on serious work

The cost of proximity bias does not fall evenly across the workforce. Research on who is most affected consistently points to the same groups: caregivers, often women, who have built flexible arrangements around family responsibilities. People with disabilities or health conditions that make regular commuting difficult. Employees in geographically distributed organizations who live far from headquarters through circumstance rather than preference. Professionals in cities with prohibitive housing costs who have accepted remote roles specifically to make their career financially viable.

For many professionals, relocating is not a lifestyle choice. It is driven by caregiving, cost, or citizenship. When proximity becomes a de facto requirement for advancement, it functions as a tax on the exact people most likely to bring diverse perspective and experience to an organization. And the talent cost compounds over time. The most capable people on a team are the ones with the most options. If advancement decisions consistently favor physical presence over demonstrated performance, the result is a slow-motion talent drain that does not show up in the metrics until the exits start.

What leaders who get this right actually do

The organizations addressing proximity bias effectively share a common feature: they have stopped relying on informal visibility as a proxy for contribution and replaced it with structures that make performance legible regardless of location.

That means building explicit, documented criteria for advancement decisions that are applied consistently across in-office, hybrid, and remote employees, and auditing those decisions regularly against the criteria rather than assuming good intent is sufficient. It means creating deliberate visibility mechanisms for remote contributors, structured ways of showcasing work and contributions that do not depend on a person being physically present in the right meeting at the right moment. And it means leaders actively expanding their informal networks beyond the people they happen to see most often, a discipline that does not come naturally but is essential for making fair decisions about people who are not physically in the room.

For employees navigating this reality, the research points toward proactive visibility rather than waiting for performance to speak for itself. Documenting contributions explicitly, seeking involvement in cross-functional work, building relationships with leaders across the organization rather than only with a direct manager, and learning to communicate results in the language of organizational impact rather than personal effort. None of that should be necessary in a purely meritocratic system. In the system that actually exists, it is.

What this is really about

At its core, proximity bias is a confidence problem as much as it is a structural one. It reflects a failure of organizational confidence in tools and criteria that could evaluate performance accurately regardless of where someone sits. Leaders who default to visibility as a proxy for value are, in some sense, admitting that they do not fully trust the signals their own systems are generating. The result is a workplace where two people can produce identical work and receive meaningfully different futures, not because one of them earned it, but because one of them was easier to see.

That gap is fixable. But fixing it requires leaders to be honest about what is actually driving their decisions before they can meaningfully change it.

If you want your organization to build a culture where the people doing the most serious work are also the people getting recognized for it, Juan Bendana builds keynotes around the psychology of confidence, visibility, and what it takes to lead equitably across the boundaries that modern work has created. His talks are built for leadership conferences, corporate events, and sales kick-offs where organizations are ready to close the gap between what they say they value and what their decisions actually reward.

The most dangerous assumption in any organization is that the people doing the best work are also the people being seen.