The Covid pandemic was many things, but it in workplace circles, it provided the largest experiment in remote working ever seen. While the general consensus is that employees liked it and were reasonably productive, there are concerns about its impact on things like creativity and innovation.

In a recent article, I wrote about some research suggesting that might not always be the case, and it’s a narrative countered, however, by a second study, from Stanford, which suggests that teams that operated virtually were actually less creative than their peers who collaborated in person.

Affecting creativity

The researchers conducted a lab experiment with half of the participating teams working together online and the remainder working together in person. The results showed that in-person teams were up to 20% more creative than their virtual peers.

This was then replicated in a group of engineers at a multinational company, and again, the teams working face-to-face generated not only more ideas but higher quality ideas in terms of their originality. The researchers believe that the nature of the screen contributes to this, as it presents us with a narrow field of vision, which results in our thinking becoming narrower as well.

“If your visual field is narrow, then your cognition is likely to be as well,” they explain. “For creative idea generation, narrowed focus is a problem.”

This is seldom the case for people who meet in person, as our field of vision is much broader and we can absorb information from the spaces we’re in and the people we see, which makes our minds more likely to wander too.

“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,” the authors continue. 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.”

The right approach

The researchers are at pains to point out that they don’t believe that virtual meetings have no value at all, just that we need to ensure they’re used in the right way. For instance, they found that virtual teams were pretty good at “selecting” the best ideas, just not so good at coming up with them in the first place.

This chimes with previous research showing that creativity can be boosted when lights are dimmed, as this encourages us to let our minds wander more than bright light, which encourages more focus in our thinking. Similar findings have emerged in terms of noise, with the low-level din of a coffee shop conducive to mind wandering in a way that silence is generally not.

“The shift to working more from home is here,” the Stanford team concludes. “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.”