Top 17 'Fair-Play' Remote Work Tools to try for Hybrid Teams Fighting Proximity Bias in 2025
The hybrid work model is no longer a temporary experiment; it’s the new standard for modern, flexible companies. But as we settle into this blend of in-office and remote work, a silent threat is emerging, one that can poison team culture and derail careers: proximity bias. It’s the subtle, often unconscious, preference managers have for the employees they see every day. The ones they grab coffee with, chat with in the hallway, or pull into a spontaneous brainstorming session.
This bias creates a two-tiered system. In-office employees get more visibility, better opportunities, and faster promotions, while their equally talented remote counterparts feel overlooked, disconnected, and undervalued. The result? A decline in morale, a loss of top talent, and a breakdown of the very flexibility that hybrid work promises. As we look towards 2025, actively fighting this bias isn't just good management—it's essential for survival.
The good news is that we can design a more equitable workplace. It starts with a conscious cultural shift, but it’s supercharged by the right technology. This isn't about more surveillance or forced check-ins. It's about deploying 'fair-play' tools that level the playing field, democratize information, and create equal opportunities for contribution, no matter where your desk is. Here are 17 of the best remote work tools designed to help your hybrid team thrive by tackling proximity bias head-on.
1. Loom: For Asynchronous Clarity
Loom is a video messaging tool that lets you record your screen, camera, and voice simultaneously. Instead of typing out a long email or scheduling yet another meeting, you can send a quick, personal video message. This is a powerful antidote to the "drive-by" desk conversations that exclude remote workers.
By defaulting to asynchronous video updates, you create a library of accessible information. A project manager can record a 5-minute project kickoff, a designer can walk through a new mockup, or an engineer can explain a piece of code. Everyone receives the same context, in the same rich format, at the same time. It replaces the quick huddle around a single monitor, ensuring no one is left out of the loop.
- Fair-Play Tip: Create a team-wide challenge to replace one meeting per week with a Loom video. For status updates, encourage team members to post short Looms in a dedicated Slack channel instead of relying on synchronous stand-ups where remote voices can be drowned out.
2. Miro: For the Infinite, Shared Whiteboard
The physical whiteboard is a classic casualty of proximity bias. Ideas scribbled during an in-office session are often lost to remote team members. Miro solves this by creating a collaborative online whiteboard where everyone can contribute in real-time, regardless of their location. It’s a shared digital canvas for brainstorming, diagramming, and planning.
The key to making Miro a fair-play tool is to make it the single source of truth for collaborative sessions. When a hybrid meeting involves brainstorming, everyone—including those in the office—should join the Miro board from their own device. This prevents the in-person group from dominating a physical board while remote attendees watch passively.
- Fair-Play Tip: Use Miro’s built-in voting and timer features to structure brainstorming sessions. This ensures every idea is seen and considered, and every person has an equal chance to contribute their thoughts without being interrupted.
3. Gather: For Spontaneous Social Connection
One of the biggest advantages of being in the office is the unplanned "water cooler" moments that build camaraderie. Gather creates a virtual office space using 2D, 8-bit graphics where team members can move their avatars around. When your avatar gets close to another, a video chat automatically opens, mimicking spontaneous conversation.
This might seem playful, but it's a powerful tool for rebuilding the social fabric that proximity bias erodes. It allows for casual check-ins, quick questions, and social interactions that feel natural and unforced. You can create virtual "desks," "meeting rooms," and even "cafeterias" to foster a sense of presence and belonging for your remote crew.
- Fair-Play Tip: Schedule a weekly "office hours" or "social hour" in Gather where everyone is encouraged to hang out. This creates a low-pressure environment for the kind of informal chats that strengthen team bonds.
4. Notion: For the Centralized Team Brain
Information silos are a breeding ground for proximity bias. When project plans, meeting notes, and key decisions live in scattered documents or are only shared verbally in the office, remote employees are at a massive disadvantage. Notion acts as an all-in-one workspace, a central "brain" for your entire team.
You can use it to create beautiful, interconnected documents, databases, and project roadmaps. By committing to documenting everything in Notion—from meeting minutes to project specs to company policies—you create a level playing field. Success is no longer about who you sit next to; it’s about accessing the shared source of truth. In my work with leaders, a point I often stress, much like Goh Ling Yong does in his keynotes, is that making information universally accessible is the foundation of a fair hybrid culture.
- Fair-Play Tip: Create a "Decisions" database in Notion. Every time a significant decision is made, a new entry is created detailing the what, why, and who. This transparency ensures everyone is aware of the team's direction, not just those who were in the room where it happened.
5. Lattice: For Equitable Performance Management
Proximity bias heavily influences performance reviews. Managers may have a clearer, more positive memory of the contributions made by employees they see daily. Lattice helps standardize performance management by providing a structured framework for goals (OKRs), 1-on-1s, feedback, and career development tracks.
By using a tool like Lattice, you ensure that every employee is evaluated against the same clear, pre-defined criteria. It prompts managers to have consistent, documented check-ins with all their direct reports, remote and in-office alike. This data-driven approach shifts the focus from perceived effort (visibility) to actual results and impact.
- Fair-Play Tip: Use Lattice’s 1-on-1 agenda feature to empower employees. Encourage every team member to add their own talking points before their meeting, ensuring they have an equal opportunity to discuss their accomplishments, challenges, and career goals with their manager.
6. Slack: For Deliberate Communication Channels
While Slack is ubiquitous, using it intentionally is key to fighting proximity bias. Its power lies in creating specific, public channels for different topics, projects, and teams. This moves conversations out of private DMs and in-person chats into a searchable, accessible forum for all.
Leverage features like Clips (short audio and video messages) and Huddles (spontaneous audio-only conversations) with care. While Huddles can be great, always post a summary of the outcome in the channel for those who couldn't join. The goal is to make communication transparent and default to public channels whenever possible.
- Fair-Play Tip: Implement a
#kudosor#winschannel where anyone can publicly recognize a colleague's great work. This makes achievements visible to the entire organization, ensuring that the excellent work of remote employees receives the same recognition as that of their in-office peers.
7. Vowel: For Searchable, Actionable Meetings
Meetings are a primary hotspot for proximity bias. In-person attendees often dominate the conversation, and valuable context is lost for those who couldn't attend. Vowel is an AI-powered meeting tool that records, transcribes, and summarizes your meetings, turning them into a searchable, shareable asset.
With Vowel, anyone can catch up on a meeting in minutes by reading the AI-generated summary and action items. They can search the transcript for keywords or jump to specific moments in the recording. This means that being unable to attend a meeting live no longer puts an employee at a disadvantage.
- Fair-Play Tip: Make it a team policy to share the Vowel recording and summary link in the relevant project channel after every meeting. This reinforces the idea that the meeting's value lives on beyond the live event and is accessible to all.
8. Asana: For Radical Task Transparency
"Out of sight, out of mind" is a real problem for remote workers' contributions. Asana makes work visible. By tracking all tasks, projects, deadlines, and responsibilities in one place, it provides a clear and objective view of who is doing what, and how much progress they're making.
When a manager wants to know who is a top performer, they don't have to rely on who they see working late. They can look at the data in Asana to see who is consistently delivering high-quality work on time. This transparency in workload and output is a powerful equalizer.
- Fair-Play Tip: Use Asana's "Portfolios" feature to track the progress of high-level team goals. Regularly review these portfolios in team meetings to celebrate progress and highlight contributions from everyone, ensuring all work is seen and valued.
9. Butter: For Hyper-Engaging Hybrid Workshops
Standard video conferencing tools can make remote participants feel like second-class citizens in a hybrid workshop. Butter is designed from the ground up to make virtual sessions as engaging and interactive as possible, leveling the playing field for participation.
With features like a dynamic agenda, integrated polls, a fun soundboard, and seamless breakout rooms, Butter gives facilitators the tools to actively engage everyone. Instead of the in-person group leading the energy, the facilitator can use Butter's tools to ensure remote participants have multiple ways to contribute their voice, vote on ideas, and take part in activities.
- Fair-Play Tip: When running a hybrid session, use Butter's polling and Q&A queue exclusively. This prevents the loudest voices in the physical room from dominating and creates a single, orderly channel for everyone to ask questions and share opinions.
10. Twist: For Calm, Asynchronous Teamwork
For teams finding Slack too chaotic and real-time, Twist offers a more structured, asynchronous-first alternative. Conversations are organized into clear, topic-based threads, eliminating the pressure to be constantly online and responsive.
This fundamentally supports remote and globally-distributed teams who work on different schedules. It values thoughtful, well-articulated contributions over quick, real-time reactions. By slowing down communication, Twist helps prevent the in-office majority from making rapid-fire decisions that leave remote colleagues behind.
- Fair-Play Tip: Set team-wide expectations that important discussions and decisions must happen within a Twist thread, allowing a 24-hour window for feedback. This ensures that every team member, regardless of their time zone or work schedule, has a voice.
11. Microsoft Teams: For an Integrated Hybrid Ecosystem
For organizations already in the Microsoft ecosystem, Teams has evolved into a powerful hub for hybrid work. Its newer features are specifically designed to bridge the gap between physical and virtual participants. Intelligent cameras like the Surface Hub's Smart Camera can reframe the room to focus on the active speaker, making remote attendees feel more included.
The tight integration with the rest of the Microsoft 365 suite means that collaboration on documents, presentations, and spreadsheets can happen seamlessly within the context of a team channel or meeting. This creates a unified workspace where access to tools and information is consistent for everyone.
- Fair-Play Tip: Utilize the "Front Row" layout for hybrid meetings. This layout moves the video gallery of remote participants to the bottom of the screen, putting them at eye level with in-room attendees and reinforcing the feeling that everyone is part of the same conversation.
12. Mural: For Guided Visual Collaboration
Similar to Miro, Mural is a digital whiteboard tool, but it excels in its features for facilitation and structured collaboration. It offers a vast library of templates for specific activities like icebreakers, retrospectives, and strategic planning workshops.
Mural’s advanced facilitator controls, such as the ability to summon all participants to a specific area of the canvas and hide contributions during a brainstorming phase to prevent groupthink, are fantastic for ensuring equitable participation. A skilled facilitator can use Mural to guide a hybrid group through a process, making sure every voice is heard.
- Fair-Play Tip: Use Mural's "Private Mode" during ideation. This allows everyone to add sticky notes to the board without being influenced by others' ideas, which is especially helpful for introverted or remote team members who might hesitate to share a unique idea publicly at first.
13. Teamflow: For Virtual Co-working
Teamflow creates a virtual office floor plan where you and your team can see each other, talk, and collaborate. It's less about gamification than Gather and more focused on creating a seamless co-working experience. You can "walk" over to a colleague's desk for a quick chat or pull a group into a virtual room to co-work on a document.
This tool directly addresses the lack of spontaneous collaboration that remote workers miss out on. By making it easy to see who's available and to start a conversation with a single click, Teamflow helps replicate the fluid communication that builds stronger, more connected teams.
- Fair-Play Tip: Designate a specific "project room" in your Teamflow space where team members working on a critical initiative can co-work for a few hours each week. This creates a focused, collaborative environment accessible to all, not just those who can book a physical meeting room.
14. Confluence: For a Permanent Knowledge Base
While Notion is flexible, Confluence is the heavyweight champion of building a robust, structured internal knowledge base or wiki. To combat proximity bias, your team's processes, best practices, and historical project data must be impeccably documented and accessible to all.
If information is passed down through oral tradition in the office, remote employees will always be a step behind. Committing to a tool like Confluence means you're building a long-term, searchable repository of company knowledge. This makes onboarding new remote hires easier and ensures everyone is working from the same playbook.
- Fair-Play Tip: At the end of every major project, conduct a retrospective and document the key learnings, successes, and failures in a dedicated Confluence page. This builds institutional memory that isn't dependent on who was physically present.
15. Slab: For a Modern, Unified Wiki
If Confluence feels too corporate, Slab is its modern, beautifully designed alternative. It positions itself as a "knowledge hub for the modern workplace" and excels at integrating with all the other tools you already use, like Slack, Asana, and Google Drive.
Slab's strength is in its simplicity and powerful search. It helps you create a single source of truth that is easy to contribute to and navigate. By making documentation a pleasant experience, it encourages a culture of writing things down, which is a cornerstone of a fair and transparent hybrid environment.
- Fair-Play Tip: Use Slab's "Topics" to organize content. Create a "How We Work Hybrid" topic that outlines your team's specific communication norms, meeting etiquette, and expectations for both remote and in-office employees.
16. Tandem: For Effortless Pair Programming & Collaboration
Tandem is a virtual office designed for deep collaboration. It lets you see what app your teammates are working in, talk with a single click, and co-work within any desktop app. It's particularly powerful for technical teams but useful for any pair-based collaborative work.
This tool breaks down the barrier to asking for a quick second opinion or help on a problem, something that's easy in an office but cumbersome for remote workers. With Tandem, a remote designer can easily "peek" over the shoulder of an in-office developer (with permission, of course) to solve a problem together, just as they would if they were side-by-side. I know a few leaders, including my colleague Goh Ling Yong, who see tools like this as crucial for maintaining mentorship in a hybrid setting.
- Fair-Play Tip: Encourage "virtual pairing" sessions using Tandem for complex tasks. This not only solves problems faster but also facilitates knowledge sharing and mentorship between junior and senior team members, regardless of their location.
17. Trello: For Visualizing Progress for All
Sometimes, the simplest tools are the most effective. Trello's Kanban-style boards provide an incredibly simple yet powerful way to visualize workflow and project progress. Each card represents a task, which moves through columns like "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done."
This visual transparency is a potent antidote to proximity bias. It doesn't matter where you are working from; your contributions are clearly visible as your cards move across the board. It shifts the focus from "who looks busy" to "who is moving work to completion," creating a merit-based view of productivity.
- Fair-Play Tip: During daily or weekly team syncs, use the Trello board as the single agenda item. Go through the "In Progress" column card by card, letting the person assigned to it give their update. This structures the meeting around visible work, not just who has the floor.
Your Toolkit for a Fairer Future
Choosing the right tools is a critical step in building a thriving, equitable hybrid team. But remember, technology is an enabler, not a silver bullet. These tools will only be effective if they are backed by a genuine commitment from leadership and a team culture that values transparency, inclusivity, and clear communication.
Start small. You don't need to implement all 17 tools tomorrow. Pick one or two that address your team's biggest pain points—whether it's unstructured meetings, poor documentation, or a lack of social connection. Introduce them with clear guidelines and lead by example. By intentionally designing your tech stack and your culture to fight proximity bias, you can build a team where great work is what truly matters, no matter where it gets done.
Now, it's your turn. What are your favorite 'fair-play' tools for making hybrid work, work for everyone? Share your top picks and tips in the comments below!
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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