Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation - Nature

In a virtual meeting, all eyes are focused on screens and ignore the environment, which "constrains the associative process underlying idea generation,".

The study only looks at the cognitive costs of collaborating virtually, and the authors note that there are "concrete and immediate economic advantages to virtual interaction," including reduced travel time and expenses, less overhead, and other factors, to be balanced.

In-person meetings generate more ideas — and more creative ones — compared to videoconferencing.

Why might the quality of ideas degrade when people collaborate remotely? My favorite explanation is that collaboration requires trust, and trust implies a kind of intimacy, and it’s hard to build true intimacy via Zoom and chat.

It turns out that today’s video conferencing technology doesn’t emulate how people interact with others in person.

Microsoft says meeting time has TRIPLED since 2020: typical workers are spending 57% of their time communicating [meetings, calls] with others: 'Today, knowledge work is, quantitatively speaking, less about creating new things than it is about talking about those things.’ https://t.co/aueW97bOrg