Cognitive Biases in Remote work

Let's take a look at some common cognitive biases and how they may apply to our attitudes about remote work. While humans develop countless biases, here's a few that can affect a remote work workforce. Number one Confirmation bias. It's the tendency to surround ourselves with people who agree with us, and we only seek information or evidence that confirms our viewpoints, information we present, direction we want to take, etc. In my case, when I was debating my colleague about whether remote work was better or worse for Aruta, I realized that I didn't really read the articles or books that she gave me, at least not fully. I did, but as soon as I found something that conflicted with my belief, I put the book down or the article down. However, when I found an article or book that agreed with my position, I would read it vociferously and drafting an AHA email to boot, I was clearly giving more weight to the views that were remote work didn't work. Also, when you are the boss, unless you trained your staff well and let them know there are no ramifications for disagreeing with you, your team will tend to agree with you even if they think you're wrong. I've learned this one over the years and I tell my employees that you will actually be rewarded for disagreeing with me as I always want to make the right decision. Don't worry about my ego. If I make the wrong decision about our company, that hurts us all. Me included, right? So the key is ensuring that they understand that disagreement and healthy debate is actually encouraged. To get to the truth, there have to of course be rules of engagement, right? For instance, no personal attacks. When the debate is over, it's over. No grudges. All that said, I did have more people, not just employees but outside advisors, agreeing with me than not. Now that I was essentially forced to look at this issue in unbiased, critical thinking fashion, I realized that there were far greater benefits to remote work than office work if it was set up properly for success. Now another cognitive bias is negativity bias. We sort of talked about this one. This is a global bias whereby people tend to focus more or solely on the negatives of a situation as opposed to examining the positives. Here too, I was guilty thinking all of the downsides of working remotely like cybersecurity issues. Oh my God. Collaboration, trust, productivity. Not only were some of these wrong, but there was a lot of positives in each of these issues if it was handled properly. This was also a little personally disappointing to me as one of my favorite mindsets is Christ of Tunity. So I had already trained my mind to find positive situations in any crisis, positive opportunities. Number three is the status quo bias. Most people generally like things to be the same, really to stay the same. And they have an aversion to change. They view change as risky and requires energy to change. Right? They have already put time and energy into what they are going to do and what they're doing and and they have a great reason to keep doing that right now. Another one, A similar bias to that is the sunk cost bias. People have a tendency to give more weight to the option that they have invested more time, energy or money into something other than other options. Right? Even if the other option makes more sense in reality, it doesn't matter how many resources you sunk into an option. Logically, you should choose the option that makes the most sense for you and your business going forward. These are just a few of the cognitive biases that apply to remote work. There are many more. If you really want to dig into this, you can check out our other episode on cognitive biases. I find the topic fascinating and so important because we can have the tendency to make the wrong decisions, those that are not in our best interest if we allow these biases to remain blind spots.