During the COVID pandemic, technologies like Zoom, Teams or Skype enabled millions of employees to hold remote meetings with sound and vision.
This virtual collaboration could well continue, as recent surveys show that in the United States, for example, 20% of working days will take place from home after the end of the pandemic, the study underlines.
Its authors, marketing experts from Columbia and Stanford universities in the United States, wanted to know how this renunciation of face-to-face interactions affects innovation, i.e. the ability to generate new ideas in exchange, brainstorming or brainstorming.
They conducted initial laboratory tests with 602 volunteer participants (students) who were randomly paired. The couples either faced each other in the same room or were separated in two distant rooms and spoke to each other via video call. Each team had 5 minutes to find creative uses for products – a frisbee and bubble wrap. Then she had to choose her most creative idea.
The experience was replicated in companies with 1,490 engineers in Finland, Hungary, Portugal, India and Israel: during dedicated workshops at their premises, the groups were invited to propose innovative products for their telecom specialized companies.
The result: Face-to-face interactions generated about 15% more ideas than virtual interactions and 13% more creative ideas.
However, good news for Zoom, Skype and Teams: When teams had to choose their best idea, virtual exchanges proved just as fruitful as in-person exchanges, sometimes even a little more.
Researchers concluded that only creativity was inhibited by video calling, while other skills appeared unaffected.
But why? Previous research has made a neurological connection between vision and focus, showing that people are paradoxically more creative when they’re less focused, says Melanie Brucks, a professor of marketing at Columbia Business School and co-author of the study, in a video presentation of his work .
To test this, she equipped her guinea pigs with an eye-tracking device. She was able to show that virtual partners spent almost twice as much time looking at each other as they did face-to-face.
Video calls drew attention to a limited space—the screen—thereby limiting the cognitive process of creation. As people shared face-to-face, they shared a whole environment that was more conducive to the branching of thoughts that spawned new ideas, the authors develop.
They suggest not doing away with virtual collaboration — which has its perks — but reserving it for specific tasks and favoring being in the office for brainstorming sessions.
And not to get too distracted like this group of engineers from Poland, whose company organized the workshops in a hotel for a seminar. The participants clearly cared more about the coffee and biscuits served at the hotel bar than the experimental protocol from which they were eventually excluded.