Managing A Remote Workforce: Are You Affected By These 5 Biases?

One significant effect of the pandemic is the emergence of remote working options. Lockdowns and the need for other safety measures resulted in companies everywhere having employees work from home rather than in a corporate office setting. While that arrangement works for a lot of employers and employees, some problems have developed. How managers work with and evaluate employees has changed, and five commonly recognized biases are complicating company management/employee relationships. Are you seeing these biases?

1.) Recency Bias

Managers tend to have short memories about specific employees and their job performance. Recency bias involves timing. In other words, managers tend to remember an employee’s most-recent performance rather than fitting a recent event into a long performance history. Industry experts recommend managers pay more attention to logging a series of efforts rather than focusing on one recent project’s results when evaluating an employee’s performance. In most cases, utilizing employee performance tracking tools will eliminate or minimize this type of bias.

2.) Distance Bias

This bias is exactly what it says. Managers tend to give more credence to the performance of employees who are close. That’s a major problem if some (or all) of your employees are remote or working in hybrid situations. It’s far too easy to favor those who are still working from the office or communicating more often. The logical solution here is for management to take the time to communicate with all remote employees frequently. That’s not always easy, as the very nature of some positions makes frequent communications awkward, but the importance of routinely touching base with every employee cannot be overstated. One possible solution to this bias is having managers work offsite so they better empathize with the issues employees face.

3.) Primacy Bias

This form of bias is harder for some people to grasp. With primacy bias, managers tend to base an evaluation using only a small part of the available information to make an all-encompassing decision about an employee’s overall performance. It’s easy to do, but management teams must take steps to combat this type of action, as it undermines the overall impact of an employee’s contributions and could easily impair the outcome of a major project. Here again, tracking an employee’s performance over a long period using appropriate software will help to eliminate the bias.

4.) Leniency Bias

Managers are like anyone else, and they don’t always feel it’s appropriate to harshly criticize an employee. If criticism is needed but not brought up at a review, an employee may not change, which leads to reduced productivity in the future. Every employee needs to be evaluated fairly, and omitting a problem during a review is not going to benefit anyone. Proper feedback, backed by strong data, is appropriate and avoids leniency bias.

5.) Similarity Bias

Everyone likes people who share similar traits, and managers are no different. With this form of bias, a manager may unfairly rate an employee simply because that individual is dissimilar and doesn’t share their philosophies. That can quickly undermine the work ethic of a good employee or, conversely, unfairly boost an underperforming one. Experts recommend using fair evaluation measures and taking steps to establish some type of rapport with every employee.

While totally eliminating all forms of bias is almost impossible, managers can reduce the likelihood of bias issues playing a major role in evaluations by using appropriate software solutions to track employee performance over long periods of time. If you’re seeing evidence of bias in your organization, now is the time to take steps to minimize the impact of those biases.