The Virtual Edge in Team Collaboration

Surprising cases where interacting online produces better performance than being in person

How do you decide whether to meet via Zoom or face-to-face?

For most people, the decision to meet online or in person likely depends on whether the attendees can physically meet and, if so, will they want to come into the office.  Even so, the majority of people still believe “being face-to-face is best, but video is the next-best thing.” However, while face-to-face meetings have their benefits, research suggests that there are times when meeting via online collaboration tools is superior to face-to-face meetings in surprising ways.

This is an important understanding for optimizing team effectiveness in a world where remote work is increasingly prevalent. As I mentioned in a previous article, we cannot universally assume remote work or in-office work is better. We have to look at the specifics of what the team is trying to accomplish, and one approach is to consider the goal and type of team activity rather than the role.

The Medium Changes the Message

Marshall McLuhan is famous for highlighting that "the medium is the message," which means that the form or medium through which information is conveyed often overshadows the actual content of the message itself.  Most people realize, for example, that text messaging and video conferencing limit our forms of expression and our ability to read body language. However, this view is too narrow.

Collaboration technology also focuses your attention on some things and not others. It channels the conversation and thus influences what is said and how decisions are made. So, let’s look at the results of two studies to get more insight.

The Formation of Shared Mental Models

A mental model is the blueprint for how we perceive and interact with the world around us. It's our framework of beliefs, assumptions, and cognitive shortcuts that help us make sense of complex information, predict outcomes, and make decisions.

Peter Senge, celebrated organizational learning advocate and author of The Fifth Discipline, noted that shared mental models:

Enhance the team’s capacity to think and act in synergistic ways with full coordination and a sense of unity, because team members know each other’s hearts and minds.

So in the world of organizational development and change, it is considered advantageous for a team to have shared mental models. It is also typically assumed that the more there is conversation—especially in person—the more shared the team’s mental models will be.

But, wait. Not so fast.

An experiment by Chinese researchers sought to understand the effects of technology on the formation of mental models.[1] In the experiment, about 60 participants were divided into triads and then assigned to work together either face-to-face or by text message only. Both the face-to-face and text-only teams were tasked to estimate the market demand for kindergartens in their city.

The results were evaluated by comparing the cognitive maps of each team’s mental model. And guess what? The researchers found that shared mental models in the face-to-face teams declined!

This finding seems to have occurred for several reasons:

• The text-messaging teams were more focused on the task and information that was important to decision-making.

• The face-to-face setting brought out several counter-productive aspects of group behavior that are otherwise dampened in an online setting. While the specifics were not explored in the study, multiple other studies have mentioned behaviors like people could not use the loudness or tone of their voice to dominate the conversation, and team members were not as inclined to introduce their personal agendas into the conversation.

• The extraneous information in a face-to-face setting over-complicated the team’s mental models, causing them to emphasize more non-factual aspects.

Even more surprising, the face-to-face teams became increasingly convinced they were right, even though they were not. This is a phenomenon in psychology known as the illusion of knowledge.[2]

In short, the technology was thus able to minimize some unproductive tendencies that occur in face-to-face meetings. That is, it provided focus and facilitation for the meeting that was absent in the face-to-face meetings. Had trained facilitators been the face-to-face meetings, there might have been a different result. However, switching the meeting to use an online tool is a lot easier than training and deploying trained facilitators.

Decision Accuracy in Virtual Worlds

Beyond simple text messaging or video conferencing, a rapidly developing area is team collaboration in a simulated world like Second Life. But what happens to team decision-making?

A study by Jeannie Pridmore and Gloria Phillips-Wren of the Loyola University of Maryland compared team performance in face-to-face settings versus teams in Second Life. The teams were tasked with coming up with the best ways to use their gear in two survival scenarios: one at sea and one in space.

The researchers reported that:

We found that virtual teams in the virtual world took a somewhat longer time to reach a decision, but their decision accuracy was better than face-to-face teams. The results were surprising and suggest that virtual world technology can be an effective team operating environment.

In a follow-up survey, the virtual participants did mention some problems reading other people and face cues. However, they frequently indicated surprise at how many of the expected communication problems did not occur.

While difficulty in reading body language and faces in a virtual world was certainly part of the slowness for virtual teams, it should be noted that all the participants had some resolvable problems with technology and were new to the Second Life platform. These “learning curve” problems would have diminished over time.

While the authors of the study did not opine on or study the reasons for the difference, it seems reasonable to assume that, like the previous example, the online team performed better because they were more task-focused and less influenced by social psychology factors that occur more with face-to-face teams.

Reflections and Applications

The studies presented here question the assumption that face-to-face meetings are always better.  Rather, there is evidence that you should choose the technology used for team collaboration appropriately based on what you are trying to accomplish.

Possibly, better facilitation of the face-to-face teams would have gone a long way to improve the comparative performance of teams in the studies we reviewed. However, ensuring every meeting has a trained facilitator has always been challenging. Interjecting technology to influence the flow and focus of meetings is far easier, especially with increasing AI that can capture meeting minutes and answer factual questions on the spot.

If you are building relationships or doing creative whiteboarding, face-to-face meetings are probably still better in person. But when doing idea generation, analysis, and other task-based activities, you might get better team performance by purposely doing them online.

References

1. Xie, Xiao-yun; Zhu, Yan; Wang, Zhong-Ming (2009): Effect of the Amount of Task-Relevant Information on Shared Mental Models in Computer-Mediated and Face-to-Face Teams: Is More Always Better? (9), checked on 12/05/2013.

2. Hall, Crystal C.; Ariss, Lynn; Todorov, Alexander (2007): The illusion of knowledge: When more information reduces accuracy and increases confidence (2), checked on 22/05/2013.