Microsoft released a
new study, where it found that 85% of leaders say that the “shift to hybrid work has made it challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive.” More concretely, 49% of managers of hybrid workers “struggle to trust their employees to do their best work.” This lack of trust in worker productivity has led to what Microsoft researchers termed productivity paranoia: “where leaders fear that lost productivity is due to employees not working, even though hours worked, number of meetings, and other activity metrics have increased.”
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So why do so many leaders continue to ignore the data and stubbornly deny the facts? The key lies in how leaders evaluate performance: based on what they can see.
As the
Harvard Business Review points out, leaders are trained to evaluate employees based on “facetime.” Those who come early and leave late are perceived and assessed as more productive.
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A related mental blindspot, the
confirmation bias, caused these traditionalist leaders to ignore information that goes against the beliefs to which they’re anchored, and seek information that confirms their anchors. For example, they’ll seek out evidence that in-office workers are more productive, even when there’s much stronger evidence that remote workers exhibit higher productivity. In other words, these
leaders trust their own gut reactions, internal impressions, and intuitions over the facts, thus failing to develop
self-awareness of how their mental processes might steer them to make bad decisions.
The consequence of this trust in false impressions of which type of work is more productive is leading to the unnecessary drama of forcing workers back to the office. And those older, traditionalist bosses who do so will continue to lose workers as part of the Great Resignation. A Society for Human Resources
survey in June 2022 found that 48% of respondents will “definitely” seek a full-time remote position for their next job. To get them to stay at a hybrid job with a 30-minute commute, employers would have to give a 10% pay raise, and for a full-time job with the same commute, a 20% pay raise. Given the
significant likelihood of a recession in the near future, which will limit the ability of employers to offer pay raises and lead to a focus on actual productivity over false gut-based intuitions, we
can expect a greater shift to more hybrid and remote work going forward.
Another problem of this false belief is
proximity bias. That term describes how managers have an unfair preference for and higher ratings of employees who come to the office, compared to those who work remotely, even if the remote workers show higher productivity. The face-to-face interactions between managers and employees lead to managers having
more positive impressions of these employees due to cognitive biases such as the
mere-exposure effect. This mental blindspot describes our predilection to have more favorable attitudes toward whatever we see more often, whether people or things, without any basis for this favorable attitude other than mere exposure.