Thoughts are free? Not in video meetings!
Video calls will probably remain an integral part of our professional communication even after the pandemic. When it comes to creative brainstorming, however, it's better to meet face-to-face.
"Do we meet in person or do we video call?" That question will remain for many, even as coronavirus joins the ranks of endemic pathogens. Surveys indicate that many employees will continue to want to work more from a home office. The big drawback: creativity suffers when talking over a computer screen. Melanie Brucks from Columbia University and Jonathan Levav from Stanford University came to this conclusion in the scientific journal "Nature".
First, about 300 experimental pairs were asked to consider how a Frisbee or a bubble wrap could be used in the most unusual way possible. While one half of the interlocutors sat opposite each other, the other half communicated via video conference. Students then evaluated how new the subjects' ideas were. Fewer ideas were generated in the digital encounters, and they were also less creative than the suggestions generated during a real meeting. However, when it came to selecting the best idea, video meetings were tied.
To find out what exactly made the people sitting across from each other more creative, the marketing researchers equipped the lab rooms with various, more or less unusual objects. When the participants sat together, they looked around the room more often and were able to remember more details about their surroundings after the experiment. The more often they looked around and the more objects they remembered, the more creative ideas they developed, the researchers report. In a video conference, on the other hand, their gaze lingered more on the screen. According to Brucks and Levav, this confirms the hypothesis that virtual communication narrows the field of vision, which also makes it less possible to think "out of the box."
Through surveys, they determined that virtual couples felt just as connected and familiar as people working together in person - so that couldn't explain the difference. Studies of (body) language and facial expressions also revealed no evidence that videoconferencing per se had decisively changed participants' communication. Brucks and Levav also supported their findings with a realistic field experiment. 1,500 employees of an international telecommunications company repeated a similar experiment in five countries in Europe, Asia and the Middle East - with the same results. Work involving the development of creative ideas is therefore better done face-to-face.
Spectrum of Science
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