Imagine a world where your manager gauges your productivity by the number of hours you spend at your desk.

Sounds archaic, right? Yet evidence shows that’s exactly how managers who are taught to “manage by walking around” tend to evaluate their employees. This management style, of looking around to see who is working, systematically causes managers to undervalue the productivity of hybrid and remote workers.

The resulting "proximity bias" is the ghost in the machine — the unseen hand pulling managers back to outdated office-centric models, whether in the federal government or in the private sector.

The reality of productivity and retention in hybrid and remote work is quite different. Nick Bloom, the most prominent scholar on hybrid and remote work, collaborated with other scholars at Stanford University to study call center employees at a NASDAQ-listed company with 16,000 staff. Their paper was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Staff at the call center were offered a chance to apply for a work-from-home arrangement. Post-application, the researchers randomly selected half of the applicants to work from home while the other half continued their roles in the office environment. The company did not train managers in overseeing work-from-home staff, nor did it make any other substantial alterations to adapt to the new setup.

Over a span of nine months, the work-from-home group showed a 13 percent performance increase compared to the in-office group, all while maintaining........

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