When a colleague asks how you are, your answer is probably some variation of “busy” or “swamped.” This isn’t an accident. Research from Columbia Business School calls it the “conspicuous consumption of time,” where signalling a lack of leisure has…
I used to think the advice to “blend work and life seamlessly” was the goal. Then I read a specific finding from Glen Kreiner’s research: the mismatch between your preferred boundary style and your work environment is not symmetrical. People…
A 2021 field experiment published in Labour Economics found that women’s participation dropped by 18.7 percentage points when a discussion moved from a small group to a formal presentation. They went from 43.3% participation to 24.6%. The men in the…
One-third of people treated for clinical burnout are still exhausted seven years later. The finding comes from a longitudinal study of 217 patients, most of them women. Almost half still reported persistent fatigue at the follow-up. Burnout is not a…
A team of researchers at MIT and Carnegie Mellon put 699 people into small groups and tested them on tasks from brainstorming to complex problem-solving. They assumed the groups with the highest individual IQs would perform best. They were wrong.…
If you check your calendar and see 30.9% of your meeting time involves email multitasking, you are not an outlier. You are the average. A 2021 study analysing remote meetings found that precise figure. The odds of it happening increase…
When you feel ‘office politics’ at work, that is not a vague irritation. It is a measurable stressor. Research that consolidated 79 independent samples found a clear correlation: the more political employees perceive their workplace to be, the lower their…
Close to nine out of ten people hold at least one bias against women. The United Nations Development Programme’s data covers 85% of the world’s population. This is not a matter of individual opinion; it is a measurable social norm.…
Consider it a weekly tax, but paid in mental energy, not money. A 2021 report by Acas estimated the cost of workplace conflict to UK employers at roughly £28.5 billion per year. For context, that is over £1,000 per employee.…
A person forms an initial judgement of trustworthiness from your face in 100 milliseconds. That is less time than it takes to blink. Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov’s study found the correlation between impressions formed in that time and those…