Long -distance exchanges through videoconferencing, which have been important since the explosion of teleworking, hinder the production of collaborative ideas (brainstorming), according to a study of 1,500 people worldwide published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
During the COVID pandemic, technologies like Zoom, Teams or Skype allowed millions of employees to hold remote meetings, with sound and picture.
This virtual collaboration could continue, with recent polls showing that in the United States, for example, 20% of workdays will occur from home after the end of the pandemic, the study emphasizes.
Their authors, marketing experts for the American universities of Columbia and Stanford, wanted to know the effects of this abandonment of face-to-face interaction on change, in other words the ability to generate new idea during an exchange, the brainstorming, or brainstorming.
They conducted preliminary laboratory tests, with 602 volunteer participants (students) randomly paired. Couples can face each other in the same room or separately in two distant spaces, talking to each other via video call. Each team has 5 minutes to find creative uses for the products – a frisbee and bubble wrap. Then he has to choose his most creative idea.
The experience was replicated in companies with 1,490 engineers in Finland, Hungary, Portugal, India and Israel: during dedicated workshops within their area, groups were invited to suggest innovative products for their companies. , who specializes in telecommunications.
The result: in-person interactions produced approximately 15% more ideas than virtual interactions, and 13% more creative ideas.
Good news, however, for Zoom, Skype and Teams: when teams have to pick their best idea, virtual exchanges have proven to be as fruitful as face to face, and sometimes even more so.
The researchers concluded that only creativity is hindered by video calls, when other skills seem unaffected.
But why? Previous research has established a neurological link between vision and concentration, and has shown that, paradoxically, people are more creative when they are less focusedexplains Melanie Brucks, professor of marketing at Columbia Business School, co-author of the study, in a video presentation of her work.
To test it out, he fitted her guinea pigs an eye tracking device. He verified that virtual partners spent nearly twice as much time looking at each other than their face-to-face counterparts.
Video calls focus attention on limited space-the screen-thus limiting the thought process of creation. While face to face, people shared the whole environment, more conducive to branching of thoughts to generate new ideasdevelop authors.
They suggest not deleting virtual collaborations – which have their advantages – but allocating them for certain specific tasks, favoring the office presence for brainstorming.
And don’t be too distracted like this group of engineers from Poland whose company organized workshops in a hotel for a seminar. The participants were obviously more worried about coffee and cookies served in the hotel bar only by the experimental protocol, in which they were finally excluded.
Source: Radio-Canada
