Workers think less creatively in Zoom meetings, study finds

theguardian.com:

As if the endless muting and freezing, the need for shelves lined with high literature, and the constant fear of a colleague wandering on screen unclothed were not enough to worry about, researchers have found that Zoom stifles creativity.

Meeting face to face produced more ideas, and ideas that were more creative, compared with videoconference discussions, according to lab experiments and a field study at a firm with offices around the world.

While the enormous benefits of Zoom and other videoconferencing tools made them indispensable in the pandemic, the research suggests that heavy reliance on the technology comes at a cost to creative thinking.

“It’s really important to have multiple creative ideas to draw from, and having a larger pot of creative ideas is going to increase your probability of success,” said Dr Melanie Brucks, an assistant professor of marketing at Columbia University in New York.

Brucks and her colleague Jonathan Levav at Stanford started their investigation before the pandemic when managers reported having trouble innovating with remote workers. Brucks was sceptical that videoconferencing was a factor, suspecting that difficulties coordinating large, global teams online might be to blame instead.

To find out, the researchers recruited more than 600 volunteers who were paired up to tackle a creativity task either together in the same room, or virtually over Zoom.

The pairs had five minutes to come up with creative uses for a Frisbee or bubble wrap and a minute to select their best idea. Independent judges ruled that turning a Frisbee into a plate was less creative than using it to knock fruit from a tree, while using bubble wrap to send morse code messages was more creative than using it to protect a