Large collaborative meetings over Zoom. Image Credit: Zoom blog.

Zoom meetings offered a solution during the COVID-19 pandemic lock-downs to keep in touch with colleagues and family. Nowadays more people than ever are using videoconferencing tools for work. Every week, knowledge workers around the world spend many hours in front of a flat-screen discussing with their collaborators and trying to come up with ideas. How does this new alternative affect the post-pandemic work?

A recent study, published in Nature, by Melanie Brucks from Columbia Business School and Jonathan Levav from Stanford School of Business studied how these tools for virtual collaboration affect creative idea generation. The researchers performed experiments, using more than 600 volunteers who were paired up to perform a creativity task, such as finding alternative uses for a Frisbee. Half of them did that in person, and half over Zoom. The researchers found that the first group had around 20% more creative ideas compared to the virtual group.

(S)imply being at the same physical place as somebody else, improves idea generation.

-Melanie Brucks

The main results of this work are that videoconferencing:

  1. inhibits the production of creative ideas, but
  2. it does not affect the effectiveness of idea selection.

Another interesting finding from this work that could explain the lack of creative ideas using videoconferencing tools is our fixation to our partners. The participants in the virtual group spent almost two times more time looking at their partners compared to the in-person one. Our minds are much better in creating creative ideas when we let our senses more free and when we are less focused.

Brucks and Levav’s work is a very interesting and provides some valuable input in a question that many knowledge workers had when the pandemic started: how is creativity affected by virtual interactions. Next time you have a zoom meeting to come up with a creative idea, maybe you should consider turning off your camera!

You can also watch below a video produced by Nature regarding the study: