Editorial
When remote working was primarily a marginal activity, we paid little attention to how working virtually might affect how we think and behave. That all changed when the pandemic spurred on the largest experiment ever undertaken in remote work.
Soon after words like “zoom fatigue” entered the lexicon, following the discovery by Stanford researchers that prolonged periods of screen time decreased our energy levels. The researchers argued that, beyond the conventional understanding that screen time causes eye strain, the very nature of Zoom calls were responsible.
They identified the increased eye contact involved in video calls as the culprit. When we're speaking face-to-face with someone, we typically look away to give our eyes and minds a break. On Zoom, we look at others far more frequently.
Think of how mentally challenging it is to give a speech or presentation under the gaze of a room full of people and you’ll get a sense of the problem at hand. What's more, when you’re giving a speech you’re usually oblivious to the facial expressions of your audience. That's not the case on Zoom.
Dumbed Down
As well as tiring us out, our virtual workspaces have also affected how we behave. While multiple studies have shown that productivity remained more or less the same while working from home, this productivity typically was limited to “business as usual.” In general, creativity, collaboration and innovation suffered.
For instance, research from Carnegie Mellon suggested that the use of Zoom and other video platforms is reducing the collective intelligence of our teams. The researchers argue that the choice to replicate the face-to-face meetings of the pre-pandemic era to online ones hasn’t proven particularly effective, because we’re better at understanding verbal and nonverbal cues in person than we are on video.
“We found that video conferencing can actually reduce collective intelligence,” the researchers wrote. “This is because it leads to more unequal contribution to conversation and disrupts vocal synchrony. Our study underscores the importance of audio cues, which appear to be compromised by video access.”
Researchers from MIT suggest we struggle with the so-called “Theory of Mind,” our ability to empathize with others, when we speak online. As with the Carnegie Mellon team, the MIT researchers found that without the in-person cues that are so crucial to our understanding of others, we struggle to effectively work as a team.
Related Article: Zoom Fatigue Continues, 3 Years Later. How Some Businesses Are Responding
Out of Sync
A team from the University of Michigan looked at the neurology of remote work and found a subtle, yet meaningful, difference in processing time for face-to-face conversation versus virtual conversations. In real life, we have a roughly 200 millisecond transition time between speakers. This incredibly short time gives the listener enough time to comprehend what the speaker is saying before they respond.
Much of this is automated by neural oscillators, which help us sync with our conversational partner. Videoconferencing, on the other hand, introduces delays as it transmits our data to the other person. The delay isn’t huge — Zoom estimates it is under 150 milliseconds on average — but it's enough to throw conversations out of sync, making conversations feel strained and less enjoyable as a result.
It should come as no surprise then, that researchers from Florida Atlantic University found that using video platforms changes our conversation styles. They discovered that we don’t replicate the kind of eye contact we usually have during a face-to-face conversation when conversing online, which impacts how effective our conversations are.
“Regardless of the specific mechanisms underlying the observed differences in fixation patterns, results from our study suggest participants were taking social and attentional considerations into account in the real-time condition,” the researchers conclude. “Given that encoding and memory have been found to be optimized by fixating the mouth, which was reduced overall in the real-time condition, this suggests that people do not fully optimize for speech encoding in a live interaction.”
Related Article: Video Meetings Are Here to Stay, Despite the Return to Office
Changing How We Work
In his seminal 1990 Harvard Business Review article, “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate,” Michael Hammer argued technology won’t improve things as long as we continue to apply new tech to old processes. Instead, we should redesign the processes to make the best use of the technology. How can we remodel work to make the most of the opportunities presented by the technology?
"Are we serving the technology or is the technology serving us?" said Christian Bason, CEO of the Danish Design Center. "This is all about behavioral design, and the habits that we form now are going to stay with us and be longer term."
Bason said that while experimentation is commonplace in many aspects of our digital worlds, for experimentation to truly work we need to perform what Toyota calls a gap analysis, which starts by benchmarking where you are, then identifying where you would like to be, then figuring out how you might bridge that gap, and finally measuring to see if you've done so.
Getting Measurement Right
Unfortunately, the measurement tools organizations have been deploying have generally been punitive in nature, designed to employees employees are working when and where they should be. They’re generally not designed to help managers and organizations learn what works.
Indeed, recent analysis by the European Commission's Joint Research Council (JRC) warns about the creep of such surveillance tools into the workplace. The report notes the growth in workplace surveillance came as more of our work became "datafied" in recent years. And while the use of data isn't going away, the key to its successful usage will require it to empower workers and to be deployed in an open and transparent way.
"Every two weeks we monitor employees’ wellbeing in order to take a 'temperature test' to see how people are doing, but this could easily be seen, and indeed used, as a surveillance tool," Bason said. "Workplace analytics is similar, and just because you can monitor people in so many different ways, it doesn't mean you should."
A key starting point is to start from a position of trust that your people are good, honest and striving to do their best. When you start there it's difficult to use metrics in a nefarious way and much easier to frame it to give employees a sense of being invested in and supported to make work as effective as possible.
Related Article: Binary Thinking Is Holding Hybrid Work Back
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The Goal? A Harmonious Relationship
We've known about the value of autonomy and flexibility for many years, and yet while the various digital tools that shot to the fore during the pandemic have promised these much-cherished elements in our working life, they have largely failed to do so.
Research from Harvard Law School advocates using "smart surveillance tools" to monitor what we do and use this data to make our work better. Mark Mortensen, Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at INSEAD believes the key is just to have regular conversations with employees. This, he suggests, will be crucial to better understand what worked during the pandemic period, what didn't and how to take these lessons forward into the post-pandemic world.
"There's a concern that with our environment becoming more uncertain, and hybrid working is certainly uncertain, we don't know the larger-scale implications," he explained. "What has got us through COVID might not be sustainable or what will get us through the post-COVID period."
We now know the longer hours people work when working remotely contribute to rising stress levels. Researchers have also identified increased levels of loneliness as a result of prolonged remote working. On top of that, as the person who typically handles more of the household workload, women deal with more frequent interruptions while working from home as recent research from UConn found.
Employers who are truly striving to better improve their work environments for the long term can uncover all of these things. Mortensen believes we should develop a culture of continuous assessment and conversation to regularly take the temperature of the workforce and do our best to ensure that they are happy, engaged and productive — wherever they are working.
"We need a systematic way to think about continual reassessment, and so you need to bake into our day-to-day work the assessing whether the way we're working is actually working," said Mortensen.
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