Your performance reviews are probably missing the point

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👋 Welcome back to All Things Remote: weekly tips for building a better remote team.

Most managers I speak to handle performance reviews one of two ways: they either put them off until the last possible moment, or they treat them as a box to tick and move on.

The result is a conversation that feels disconnected from reality, gives the employee no real insight, and leaves both sides relieved it's over.

Let’s go into that a bit more, but first…

This week's riddle:
I come once a year. Most managers delay giving me. Most employees dread receiving me. But done well, I'm the reason your best people stay. What am I? (scroll for answer)

In today's send:
✅ Why remote performance reviews so often miss the mark
✅ The proximity bias that's quietly making your reviews unfair
✅ What the best managers do instead

I’d love to know:

Top reads this week

• How to run performance reviews for remote employees

• What employees actually want from work right now

• The case for planning every minute of your working day

When your whole team is in an office, performance reviews are imperfect but manageable. You've spent the year watching people work. You have a sense of who's contributing, who's growing, who's coasting.

Remote work changes that completely (as you know)

Without daily visibility, managers often end up relying on memory…

• You remember the project that went badly…

• The meeting where someone seemed disengaged…

• The Slack message that went unanswered…

You don't necessarily remember the great and consistent work that happened in between.

It’s the bias nobody wants to admit

There's a name for what happens when someone gets evaluated on their visibility rather than their output: proximity bias.

Most people assume it only exists in hybrid teams; that once everyone's remote, the playing field is even. But in a fully remote environment, proximity bias doesn’t disappear. It just changes what “proximity” means.

Instead of physical closeness, it becomes digital visibility:

• who’s responsive in Slack.

• who speaks up in Zoom.

• who sends a well-timed update at the right moment.

The people who communicate loudly and consistently could appear to be your strongest performers, even when your quietest contributors are getting more done.

When reviews rely on impression and memory rather than evidence, they quietly disadvantage some of your best people. And in a fully remote environment, where you have fewer natural touchpoints, the gap between who seems productive and who actually is can be wider than you think.

Why adding more structure isn't always the answer