Do In-Office Workers Have a Competitive Advantage Over Remote Workers?

Remote workers are concerned that they may be getting passed up for promotions. According to the results of a recent survey by the New American Staffing Association, 56% of adults in the US believe that employees who do their work entirely from the office have the edge over fully remote coworkers when competing for raises, promotions, and bonuses. Are they right?

Perception from Management

Unfortunately for workers with a strong preference for working remotely, they might be.

According to the BBC, A study of Chinese workers in 2015 indicated that while the employees who worked from home were 13% more productive than those who worked from the office, the remote workers were actually promoted at a 50% lower rate.

If perceptions from upper management are any indication, this trend seems to persist today. A 2022 survey by Vyopta indicated that executives aren't exactly optimistic about the prospect of remote employees moving up the ranks. 41% of them said they thought remote employees were less likely to be considered for promotions, and since the survey included only respondents with the title of Vice President or higher, these were sentiments held by people with the power to influence exactly those kinds of decisions.

The reasons may come down to concerns about employee presence and engagement. 47% of the managers felt remote workers had a lack of access to company leadership, and 43% thought they were less connected to colleagues and office culture. In particular, they seemed to view employees who didn't often speak or show their faces on camera during virtual meetings in disfavor, with 41% of the managers strongly agreeing that this indicated that these workers probably don't have a long future with the company.

Workers in general – 77% of whom say they're more productive with work-from-home arrangements according to a ConnectSolution survey – would likely take exception to the views expressed in the executive survey. And management may be listening. Vyopta's study also showed that 49% of the leaders surveyed believed that C-level executives should be the ones most responsible for improving employee engagement, compared to only 6% who believed it should be up to the employees themselves. This may indicate a trend toward awareness or softening of any bias against remote workers, despite its seeming prevalence in the here and now.

What Can Remote Workers who'd Like Promotions Do?

Workers who'd like to be promoted (who doesn't?) and stay remote (as a majority of those with remote-capable jobs report wanting to do) may find themselves needing to do a little upstream swimming.

The biggest current against them? Proximity bias. In short, people tend to identify most with those whom they share space with and see most often. Especially if decision-makers are working physically in the office to begin with, this tends to keep other office-based employees top of mind when it comes to considering who to trust with additional responsibility. To help overcome this, the Harvard Business Review recommends communicating your engagement and involvement at work as visibly as possible – even if it's done virtually. In particular, they suggest asking for feedback, developing a niche, and expressing openness about additional responsibility when those things are going well.

A perhaps more difficult current to surmount is the gulf between workers and managers when it comes to attitudes about working from home versus a return to the office. According to a recent GoodHire survey, 75% of managers preferred some kind of in-person work, and 60% of them agreed that a full-time return to the physical office is imminent. Perhaps most strikingly, 77% of managers indicated that there would be severe consequences for employees who were unwilling to return to the office that year.

All this is in spite of the acknowledgment of 73% of managers in the same survey who said that engagement and productivity had remained level or improved since adopting remote work. The message is clear: to many managers, this isn't about productivity, but their own preferences or perhaps issues of work culture – a more ideological basis that's their prerogative or mandate to enforce. This is often at odds with the values of workers, 44% of whom (as indicated by the New American Staffing Association's study) would go as far as to accept a pay cut if it granted them more freedom to work remotely.

For remote workers whose path to promotion would involve a move toward management positions, their preference for remote work in the first place may simply demonstrate a departure from management's philosophy that their employers find unpalatable. Workers who find themselves in this situation will need to assess the culture of their organization on the issue and may find it's better to look for promotion into senior positions that don't necessarily involve management, and/or utilize job hopping to get a promotion into a more remote-friendly company.

Looking for a job? See who's hiring at CyberCoders.com.