Virtual Meetings Stymie Creative Teamwork

GettyImages/Ekaterina Goncharova

 

Connecting state and local government leaders

A new study finds that in-person teams generate more ideas than remote teams working on the same problem -- possibly because when people focus on the narrow field of vision of a screen, their thinking becomes narrower as well.

Virtual meetings hinder creative collaboration, researchers report.

Even if the pandemic abates enough for a return to normal, all evidence indicates that a substantial share of Americans will continue to work from home, relying on videoconferencing to team up.

The new study in Nature finds that in-person teams generated more ideas than remote teams working on the same problem.

In a laboratory experiment, half the teams worked together in person and half did so online. The in-person teams generated 15% to 20% more ideas than their virtual counterparts.

In a separate experiment involving almost 1,500 engineers at a multinational corporation, in-person teams came up with more ideas, and those ideas received higher ratings for originality.

The researchers say they’ve identified a reason online meetings generated fewer good ideas: When people focus on the narrow field of vision of a screen, their thinking becomes narrower as well.

“If your visual field is narrow, then your cognition is likely to be as well,” says Jonathan Levav a professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business. “For creative idea generation, narrowed focus is a problem.”

In contrast, people who meet in person get creative stimulation by visually wandering around the space they’re in, which makes them more likely to cognitively wander as well.

“In a video interaction, you need to fix your gaze at the screen because otherwise you’re projecting to your partner that you’re looking at something else and distracted,” Levav says. But that distraction is actually useful when it comes to sparking ideas. “If you think about disruptive ideas, they come from putting together broad concepts that are seemingly unrelated.”

Levav, who has studied how environmental cues affect people’s choices, cautions that these findings don’t mean that virtual meetings have no value. The research also found that teams meeting online did as well and possibly better than in-person teams when it came to selecting the best ideas.

The real lesson, Levav says, is that the costs and benefits of working remotely are more nuanced and less understood than most people realize.

“The shift to working more from home is here,” he says. “But the pandemic happened without giving us a chance to think about how to do remote working right. If we’re going to maintain this transition, we need to be deliberate about how we manage the process. That’s going to be the managerial challenge of the next several years.”

Levav and Melanie Brucks of Columbia Business School, then a PhD student at Stanford GSB, initiated their study well before COVID arrived. They began with a lab experiment in which participants teamed up to generate novel uses for Frisbees and bubble wrap, a common task in the academic literature on creativity.

The participants were placed in offices that contained the same assortment of objects, from filing cabinets and folders to more offbeat items like a bowl of lemons, a yoga ball box, and a poster with a skeleton on it.

The researchers used video to monitor the participants, tracking their eye movements and language as well as the ideas they generated. Overall, the in-person teams generated between 15% and 20% more ideas than those that met over video. The in-person participants also observed more and remembered more about their surroundings, and that increased recall correlated with more creativity.

The researchers then carried out a similar experiment in real life, enlisting 1,490 engineers at a multinational company spread across five countries in Europe and Asia. In contrast to the lab experiment, the engineers had genuine incentives to come up with good ideas because they could potentially evolve into new business ventures.

Once again, the in-person teams generated about 15% more ideas. They were also more likely to jump off in new directions, generating ideas that were very different from each other rather than being just minor variations on the same theme.

“You want to generate ideas that can be structured like a sprawling oak tree, not a tall and narrow cypress,” Levav says. “In the video interactions, the idea structures look more like cypresses.”

Interestingly, Levav and Brucks found that virtual meetings didn’t seem to hinder how well the participants got along. Using semantic analysis of how participants spoke to each other, they found that the virtual and in-person teams showed the same amount of mutual trust and social connection.

As remote work remains a fixture of many people’s lives, Levav says it would be worth exploring how virtual meetings work in other contexts, such as job interviews and larger group collaborations.

But for now, he says, “We don’t yet know enough to make strident judgments about the superiority of working remotely versus in person. What our research shows is that there’s subtlety.”

Source: Stanford University

This article was originally published in Futurity. It has been republished under the Attribution 4.0 International license.

X
This website uses cookies to enhance user experience and to analyze performance and traffic on our website. We also share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising and analytics partners. Learn More / Do Not Sell My Personal Information
Accept Cookies
X
Cookie Preferences Cookie List

Do Not Sell My Personal Information

When you visit our website, we store cookies on your browser to collect information. The information collected might relate to you, your preferences or your device, and is mostly used to make the site work as you expect it to and to provide a more personalized web experience. However, you can choose not to allow certain types of cookies, which may impact your experience of the site and the services we are able to offer. Click on the different category headings to find out more and change our default settings according to your preference. You cannot opt-out of our First Party Strictly Necessary Cookies as they are deployed in order to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting the cookie banner and remembering your settings, to log into your account, to redirect you when you log out, etc.). For more information about the First and Third Party Cookies used please follow this link.

Allow All Cookies

Manage Consent Preferences

Strictly Necessary Cookies - Always Active

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Sale of Personal Data, Targeting & Social Media Cookies

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act, you have the right to opt-out of the sale of your personal information to third parties. These cookies collect information for analytics and to personalize your experience with targeted ads. You may exercise your right to opt out of the sale of personal information by using this toggle switch. If you opt out we will not be able to offer you personalised ads and will not hand over your personal information to any third parties. Additionally, you may contact our legal department for further clarification about your rights as a California consumer by using this Exercise My Rights link

If you have enabled privacy controls on your browser (such as a plugin), we have to take that as a valid request to opt-out. Therefore we would not be able to track your activity through the web. This may affect our ability to personalize ads according to your preferences.

Targeting cookies may be set through our site by our advertising partners. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites. They do not store directly personal information, but are based on uniquely identifying your browser and internet device. If you do not allow these cookies, you will experience less targeted advertising.

Social media cookies are set by a range of social media services that we have added to the site to enable you to share our content with your friends and networks. They are capable of tracking your browser across other sites and building up a profile of your interests. This may impact the content and messages you see on other websites you visit. If you do not allow these cookies you may not be able to use or see these sharing tools.

If you want to opt out of all of our lead reports and lists, please submit a privacy request at our Do Not Sell page.

Save Settings
Cookie Preferences Cookie List

Cookie List

A cookie is a small piece of data (text file) that a website – when visited by a user – asks your browser to store on your device in order to remember information about you, such as your language preference or login information. Those cookies are set by us and called first-party cookies. We also use third-party cookies – which are cookies from a domain different than the domain of the website you are visiting – for our advertising and marketing efforts. More specifically, we use cookies and other tracking technologies for the following purposes:

Strictly Necessary Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Functional Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Performance Cookies

We do not allow you to opt-out of our certain cookies, as they are necessary to ensure the proper functioning of our website (such as prompting our cookie banner and remembering your privacy choices) and/or to monitor site performance. These cookies are not used in a way that constitutes a “sale” of your data under the CCPA. You can set your browser to block or alert you about these cookies, but some parts of the site will not work as intended if you do so. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser. Visit www.allaboutcookies.org to learn more.

Sale of Personal Data

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.

Social Media Cookies

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.

Targeting Cookies

We also use cookies to personalize your experience on our websites, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you, and to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our websites and your experience. You may opt out of our use of such cookies (and the associated “sale” of your Personal Information) by using this toggle switch. You will still see some advertising, regardless of your selection. Because we do not track you across different devices, browsers and GEMG properties, your selection will take effect only on this browser, this device and this website.