By AFPRelaxnews | Apr 28, 2022
Seeking to find out how the massive changes in working conditions after the pandemic impacted creativity, US researchers studied nearly 1,500 employees of a telecommunications company in Finland, Hungary, India, Israel and Portugal
[CAPTION]People are worse at coming up with creative ideas during a video call compared to meeting in person. Image: Chee gin tan / Getty Images [/CAPTION]
People are worse at coming up with creative ideas during a video call compared to meeting in person, a study said Wednesday, suggesting that workplaces should prioritise brainstorming sessions for the office.
The pandemic has changed the nature of office work, propelling a massive rise in videoconferencing that looks unlikely to abate as homeworking becomes more entrenched across the world.
Seeking to find out how this huge change affects creativity, US researchers studied nearly 1,500 employees of a telecommunications company in Finland, Hungary, India, Israel and Portugal.
_RSS_In pairs, either in person or on a Zoom call, the employees came up with as many creative ideas as they could for the company's products, then picked the best one.
The pairs who spoke in person came up with around 15 percent more, according to the study published in the Nature journal.
The researchers found similar results in an experiment involving more than 600 university students, who were also paired off and told to come up with creative ideas for either a frisbee or bubble wrap.
The in-person pairs came up with 14 percent more ideas.
However, it was not all bad news for Zoom, Skype and the other videoconferencing apps.
Both sets of results found that video calls were just as effective for selecting the best idea, a decision which requires "cognitive focus and analytical reasoning", the study said.