While virtual meetings mushroomed during the Covid pandemic, concerns remained that they weren’t as effective as more traditional meetings (which is already an incredibly low bar!)
For instance, a survey last year from Cambridge Judge Business found that the number of meetings grew by 7.4% between June 2020 and December 2021. This time spent in meetings is not time well spent, however, as the study found that the meetings are typically of low quality.
Such meetings are defined in a number of ways. For instance, participants could be multitasking throughout it, or they could double-book them with other meetings or tasks. They might even have participants with overly similar roles, which increases duplication.
“The relationships emerging from the data are clear: working longer (a higher workweek span), less productively (more low-quality meetings), and in arguably a more stressful manner (higher levels of multitasking) is associated with universally worse outcomes including a decline in work-life balance and quality of work,” the authors explain.
Poor turn taking
Recent Stanford research suggests that part of the problem might be that we’re less effective at taking turns in conversations that take place virtually. This, in turn, resulted in us generally feeling less happy and positive about the conversation.
The team followed this up with a second paper, in which they explored the various ways in which we can have better virtual meetings. They found that a failsafe tactic was to show appreciation for the other person.
After undergoing brain scans of participants as they engaged in virtual meetings, the researchers found that expressing appreciation triggers activity in the parts of the brain that are linked to social cognition.
Workplace dynamics
To simulate work-related interactions in a controlled laboratory setting, the researchers organized 72 participants into pairs and assigned them to either meet in person or connect virtually over Zoom.
The interactions between the pairs were meticulously recorded on video and audio, while portable functional near-infrared spectroscopy neuroimaging technology was employed to track the changes in brain activity, specifically oxygenation levels in different regions of the brain. The pairs were given three distinct tasks that required varying cognitive skills, with the aim of assessing their collaborative abilities.
“We could have chosen all kinds of tasks, but because we wanted it to be applicable to the work environment, we chose a problem-solving task, a creativity task, and an emotion-sharing task,” the researchers explain.
Testing performance
In an effort to comprehensively evaluate the cognitive and emotional abilities of the pairs, the researchers presented them with three distinct tasks. The first task required the pairs to identify the most important traffic safety rules on US highways.
For the second task, they were asked to come up with an innovative solution to increase water conservation in California households. Finally, the pairs engaged in an emotion-sharing task, where they discussed their personal experiences of unmet needs and their associated emotions.
To gain a comprehensive understanding of the participant’s subjective experiences, the researchers administered several surveys before and after each task, which assessed their energy and stress levels, their assessment of their own and their partner’s performance, their level of cooperation, and their sense of closeness with their partner. Additionally, the researchers conducted an objective assessment of each pair’s performance on the tasks, which involved analyzing the recorded interactions.
Encouraging monologues
The researchers found that whereas in offline conversations, we tend to take turns and have more of a back-and-forth conversation, this isn’t the case online. Instead, we each tend to speak for much longer without any interruption or contribution from our colleagues.
When people were better able to take turns and have a more natural conversation, not only did they feel more positive about the conversation but they also had a better sense of cooperation with their partner. What’s more, they even performed better on a number of tasks that were rated by observers.
“For the virtual pairs, we saw a decrease in turn-taking and that is actually a negative thing for their social interaction and task performance,” the researchers explain.
Changes in the brain
The study found that emotional sharing tasks produced the highest coherence levels between participants’ brains in face-to-face interactions, while virtual interactions generated more coherence during problem-solving and creativity tasks.
However, the authors caution against automatically equating higher coherence with better outcomes. In some cases, it may simply reflect the overactivation of certain brain regions, as seen in instances where participants struggle to hear each other.
Additionally, the researchers identified certain patterns of coherence that were associated with more turn-taking, suggesting that coherence may play a role in regulating social dynamics during interactions.
“Once we understand what happens in the brain with neuroimaging, we can develop better technological interventions,” they explain. “We might be able to help video conferencing companies improve their systems with new features that facilitate turn-taking and make brain activity as close as possible to in-person interactions.”
This phenomenon was adequately addressed by asking participants to simply spend a couple of minutes expressing some appreciation for their partner, which was sufficient to impact their brain activity. This simple task increased the interbrain coherence across the parts of the brain linked with social cognitive processing.
This, in turn, meant that both those engaging in person and virtually reported a greater sense of connection with their conversation partner. So, it seems, that showing a bit of appreciation for our colleagues could be beneficial regardless of the medium used to communicate with them, which is probably no bad thing for harmony in the workplace.
