TRENDING SCIENCE: Do virtual meetings kill creativity?

Face-to-face meetings gave way to videoconferencing during the global pandemic out of necessity. Even with the return to the office, companies around the world continue to embrace the work-from-anywhere model. Employers are also enjoying this freedom. But is this dependence on online communications negatively impacting productivity?

Research published in the journal ‘Nature’ indicates the answer is yes. According to experiments carried out with workers in several countries, Zoom meetings may limit their capacity for creative thinking. In all, 602 volunteers participated in a lab study, while 1 490 employees of a large telecommunications company were studied at their work settings in Europe, the Middle East and south Asia.Findings show that co-workers were less effective at generating creative ideas when they communicated by video. However, virtual meetings didn’t impede their ability to focus and make decisions.

“We initially started the project (in 2016) because we heard from managers and executives that innovation was one of the biggest challenges with video interaction. And I’ll admit, I was initially sceptical,” study lead author Melanie Brucks, assistant professor of business marketing at Columbia University in New York, told ‘CNN’. “When we innovate, we have to depart from existing solutions and come up with new ideas by drawing broadly from our knowledge. Coming up with alternative ways to use known objects requires the same psychological process.”

Dr Brucks added: “This visual focus on the screen narrows cognition. In other words, people are more focused when interacting on video, which hurts the broad, expansive idea generation process.”

For the lab study, the participants were randomly paired and asked to find creative uses for a product. They were also randomly selected to work together either in person or virtually. The virtual pairs delivered far fewer ideas. In the field experiment, participant pairs were randomly selected, either face-to-face or via video call. They were asked to generate ideas and choose one to submit as a new product. Here too, in-person encounters led to more creative concepts. However, when selecting which idea they wanted to present as a future product innovation, both video call and in-person pairs were equally effective.“The field study shows that the negative effects of videoconferencing on idea generation is not limited to simplistic tasks and can play out in more complicated and high-tech brainstorming sessions as well,” Dr Brucks explained. “The fact that we replicate the negative effect of videoconferencing on idea generation in our field setting suggests that the negative effect of videoconferencing will likely not weaken as people become more familiar with software such as Zoom or get more experience generating ideas and working together with their teams.”

Dr Brucks told ‘Scientific American’ that she didn’t expect virtual meetings to make creative problem-solving more difficult. “Unlike other forms of virtual communication, like phone calls or e-mail, videoconferencing mimics the in-person experience quite well, so I was surprised when we found meaningful differences between in-person and video interaction for idea generation.”

Hybrid work is here to stay. Work is no longer a place, it’s a space. Now it’s up to us to decide which job tasks may be better suited for virtual communication than others.