Despite the growth and popularity of remote work, companies and governments have increasingly been calling their employees back to the office in the past year, sometimes at the expense of significant declines in employee satisfaction. Return-to-office mandates are often based on the belief that in-person work leads to greater productivity and better relationship-building and creativity than virtual collaboration can offer. But is this true?
In reality, there’s a lot we don’t yet know about remote work and how it compares to in-person settings, especially when it comes to communication, which is the foundation of collaboration. But virtual communications do have some clear merits. They’re a quick and easy way to bridge physical distances, whether through a video call with teammates in a different city or sending chats back and forth with coworkers across the same office building.
Because of their convenience and utility, virtual communications tools have become an essential part of modern workflows, and they’re here to stay, regardless of whether employees are working remotely or in the office. What will be essential is figuring out how to get the most benefit from these tools. With that in mind, psychology researchers at UC Santa Cruz have been investigating the nuances of virtual communication, and some of their recent findings offer useful guidance on implications and best-practices for the workplace.
Implications of virtual communication for relationship-building
One of the greatest concerns with remote work has long been that it might impede workers’ ability to form strong relationships with colleagues. In a new paper published in the journal Computers and Human Behavior Reports, UC Santa Cruz researchers set out to explore how virtual communication affects one of the foundations of relationship-building.
Relationship-building relies, in part, on self-reflection and being able to accurately assess how others perceive us. One challenge that often gets in the way of relationship-building in in-person settings is the “liking gap,” which is the human tendency to underestimate how much others like us. Virtual mediums significantly limit the availability of social cues, which could seemingly worsen the liking gap, leading us to lean into our pessimistic assumptions. But psychological theory actually suggests a different outcome.
“Existing theory is that people can adapt well to online communication mediums and, with continued interaction, are able to form similar impressions and relationships as they would in-person,” said Psychology Professor Jean E. Fox Tree, senior author on the new study. “But virtual communication formats like text do offer fewer social cues. This might lead us to over-idealize, potentially reversing the effects of the liking gap.”
Liking gaps had not previously been studied specifically in virtual formats, so the UC Santa Cruz team set out to test these theories. They focused particularly on how the liking gap and other factors might be affected by switching between virtual communications tools, as is common in modern workflows.
As part of their experiment, researchers tasked pairs of participants with working together remotely to complete puzzles. Pairs were assigned to start their collaboration via either chat, audio call, or video call, then switched to a video format to work on a few additional puzzles. Afterwards, participants were asked a series of questions, including how much they thought their partner liked them, and how much they liked their partner.
Researchers found that, across all virtual mediums, participants consistently underestimated how much their partner liked them, clear evidence of a liking gap. The size of this liking gap was very similar to what would be expected in in-person communication, says lead author Vanessa Oviedo, who recently graduated from UC Santa Cruz with a Ph.D. in Psychology.
“These findings lend support to the theory that relationship-building processes adapt to virtual communications formats,” Oviedo explained. “So many people start relationships online nowadays, whether that’s remote meetings with coworkers or meeting people on dating sites, so we really need to understand how this can affect the forming of meaningful relationships. This research gives us some valuable new insight.”
Best workflows for optimizing virtual communication
The team’s research also uncovered trends that may indicate the most productive ways to combine virtual communication tools. In the study on liking gaps, after participants collaborated to complete a series of puzzles over multiple virtual communications formats, they were also asked some questions that tested their memory about the puzzles. Researchers found that task-related recall was better among participants who switched from text to video formats.
This tracked with some of the team’s prior research on how switching between communications tools affects creativity. Previous experiments had tasked pairs of participants with collaborating virtually to come up with creative stories, starting first in an audio-only or text-only format, and then switching to the other format. The study found a significant increase in the creativity of stories produced specifically among participants who switched from text to audio formats.
The researchers believe there may be benefits to starting with text-based collaboration in part because written communication leaves an easy reference point, which can aid recall. But starting with text communication also seems to improve overall conversational balance, resulting in both participants contributing more equally to task-based communications. This appears to boost creativity.
Meanwhile, other findings could help improve relationship-building in virtual meetings. To study this, researchers asked pairs of participants to collaborate via video call and take a break during their task, with some pairs encouraged to engage in small talk during the break, while others kept their microphones and cameras off. The pairs that chatted during their break later reported greater enjoyment of their interactions with their partners and increased willingness to engage with them further. They were also more likely to strike up unprompted conversation with their partner after completing the task.
These results demonstrate how incorporating small-talk into video meetings could be a powerful way to advance relationship-building in work settings, if done strategically.
“Small talk isn’t the sort of thing you can just add to your meeting agenda, because people will groan at the idea of it,” explained Andrew Guydish, a psychology doctoral alumnus and lead author of the small talk paper. “It goes against our expectations that virtual meetings should get right down to business. But despite negative perceptions of small talk, we’re finding clear positive effects from it.”
Guydish recommends creating small-talk opportunities that mirror in-person meetings, where people might take a few minutes to casually check in with each other before diving into work. In virtual settings, it helps to offer an informal yet specific prompt, like asking what good movies or TV shows people have seen lately. The response to these efforts may start slow, Guydish says, but staying consistent with it as a regular practice can help people open up over time.
Small changes like these can help to make the most of virtual communications in the workplace, the researchers say.
“At the end of the day, work isn’t just about getting the current task accomplished, it’s also about wanting to continue working together in the future,” argues Professor Fox Tree. “So attending to the social component becomes super important, and that’s as true virtually as it is in person.”
