More and more people work mainly from home and meet their colleagues primarily via video conference. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated this development. But how does virtual collaboration affect the creativity of teams? A new study shows that teams working on a task via video call come up with fewer creative ideas than teams sitting together in the same room. According to the researchers, the reason for this is that the focus on the screen also narrows the cognitive focus and thus inhibits creativity. On the other hand, when it comes to selecting the best idea, virtual teams prove to be at least as successful as personal ones.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, numerous workers have been sent to work from home indefinitely and face-to-face meetings with colleagues have been replaced by video conferences. Many companies have made their work-from-home policies more flexible, and studies estimate that even after the pandemic is over, about 20 percent of working days in the US will still be spent working from home. But how does this affect teamwork? Can video conferencing solutions replace personal contact on an equal footing?
creativity and decision-making
Melanie Brucks from Columbia University in New York and Jonathan Levav from Stanford University have now dealt with this question. In several laboratory and field experiments, they examined how creative teams are depending on whether they work together virtually or in person. The researchers recruited a total of over 600 students for the laboratory experiments and divided them into teams of two who were to jointly invent new possible applications for a product and ultimately choose the best idea. The team members either sat face to face in a room or communicated in two separate rooms via video conference.
On the one hand, the researchers counted the number of creative ideas per team, and on the other hand, they had independent judges rate how creative the respective ideas were. The jurors did not know under what conditions the proposals had come about. The result: “The virtual pairs generated a significantly lower total number of ideas and significantly fewer creative ideas,” the researchers report. “On the other hand, we found indications that virtual interaction could increase the quality of decisions.” Although the personal teams had better ideas in their pool of ideas, they often did not select the best idea for the final presentation. As a result, the ideas selected in the end were of similar quality for virtual and face-to-face couples.
Video conference narrows the focus
In order to find explanations for the phenomenon, the researchers evaluated numerous possible influencing factors. They measured how connected the test subjects felt to their team partner, analyzed the exchange of words in the conversations, tracked the eye movements of the participants and asked after the experiment to what extent they remembered the room in which they had completed the task. It turned out that the perceived attachment and trust in the team partner were similarly high in virtual and personal couples. The conversation analyzes showed minor communication problems in the video conferences, for example that the participants unintentionally spoke at the same time more often and there were fewer speaker changes than in face-to-face exchanges. However, using statistical methods, Brucks and Levav were able to show that this had no effect on creative performance.
They found another clear influencing factor for this: While the gaze of the participants who sat together in person often wandered around the room, the video conference participants focused much more strongly on their conversation partner on the screen. Accordingly, they were able to remember fewer details from the room afterwards. “The focus on the screen also results in narrower cognitive focus,” the researchers explain. For creativity, however, it is important to be able to let your thoughts roam as well as your gaze. When deciding on an idea, on the other hand, the narrower focus may be helpful.
Combine virtual and personal work
Brucks and Levav confirmed the results in a field study with almost 1,500 employees of a telecommunications company in Portugal, Israel, Finland, Hungary and India. Here, well-rehearsed teams of two should develop new product ideas for their company either personally or via video call and ultimately choose one of the innovations. Here, too, it was found that the face-to-face teams developed more creative ideas than the virtual teams. As with the laboratory studies, however, the innovations that were finally presented were just as good, since the personal teams often did not decide on their best idea.
From the authors’ point of view, their results can help companies to make home and face-to-face work as sensible as possible. At the same time, however, Brucks and Levav emphasize that there are numerous other factors to consider that were not recorded in the study. These include, for example, the cost-effectiveness of face-to-face workspaces and the possibility of including talented people who live far away through online work. “To get the best of both worlds, many companies are planning to combine face-to-face and virtual collaboration,” the researchers report. “Our results indicate that in these hybrid constellations it could make sense to prioritize creative brainstorming in face-to-face meetings.”
Source: Melanie Brucks (Columbia University, New York) et al., Nature, doi: 10.1038/s41586-022-04643-y