Our brains want to feel in control, and physical proximity is one way we can have that control. So even though we have the tools to bridge any virtual distance, it's still a natural tendency to give preferential treatment to those in arm's reach, or at least a few desks down. 

Similarity bias draws us to people who are like us, causing us to miss out on new, diverse relationships at work. It can even lead us to hire, promote, or offer more career development to people we can see ourselves in. Not good. 

We need to go out of our way to feel co...

One trick our minds use to sift through everything thrown at us is to latch onto the first piece of information we get about a particular topic, decision, pattern. 

When the American workforce went remote in March 2020, it was sudden—and not necessarily smooth. Even tho...

When we know what to expect, we know how to respond—and our brains like knowing how to respond. That's part of why shifting to remote work can be difficult: we've been working in person for years, decades in some cases, and it's hard for us to think of work in any other setting.

This is the mental shortcut that results in us seeking out, preferring, and remembering things in a way that suits what we already believe. The term has been particularly popular over the past several years, in reference to how people choose their news sources.

If you o...