Is proximity bias an issue?

While it’s now far more mainstream for many people to enjoy the flexibility of not going into the office 5 days a week, is there potentially a dark side to this?

“Finding good staff is a nightmare”. “It’s better to have someone that does an ok job than have no one at all”. “That person’s a bit negative, but we just need someone to do the work”.

I was having dinner with some wonderful friends last night. They started off as business colleagues and now I enjoy the fact that they have become friends. We got to talking about how I went about finding our amazing “Captain of Logistics” – the amazing Karen Finucane. Yes – everyone needs a Karen.

Imagine this…you are a seasoned professional, having been in your field for many years and are an expert at what you do. You have been happily, productively, and successfully working for a number of weeks/months doing a mixture of physical presence in the office during office hours and working from home at your personal preference. Your task is to complete a set amount of work for specific deadlines, so realistically, the majority of the time it doesn’t matter when or where you are when doing it (with the exception of the tasks and meetings where you’re required physically).

We’ve spoken in the past about our Heavy, Medium, Light philosophy (H, M, L). If you missed it, a very brief explanation is that you bucket your tasks into the energy spend required to complete them – is it heavy and drains you of energy, or is it light and feels like it gives energy […]

This is certainly a hot topic over the years and at NEP we often get asked for our opinion on agile offices in terms of productivity. It’s also important to think about how mental health may be impacted. We have many clients working in agile spaces and quite frankly it’s not something that comes naturally […]

From small businesses to large corporates it’s really common for leaders to think that they need more staff. In most of these cases that we see, the business or company actually needs less staff or could easily be getting more profitability from their existing people. The most common reason you think you need more staff…… […]

As a manager, do you count the number of hours, or ‘face-time’, of your employees, or do you look at their productivity and output? If it’s the latter, you are well on your way (if not there already) to having a high performing team. If your response was the former…..keep reading. For a long time […]