No matter how immersive your video conferencing solution, there will always be a little something missing from a meeting mediated by screens and speakers. You can’t smell your colleagues through a speaker, for instance. And you might not pick up on your interlocutor’s fidgety left foot, a sure sign of nerves or over-caffeination. You might not see that your boss missed a bottom button while getting dressed. These are tiny things, seemingly inconsequential, but they all add up to create a vulnerable vibe that in turn engenders an intimacy that is crucial for building empathy and trust. Meeting face to face simply has a humanizing effect on all involved.
However, it’s no longer feasible to meet face to face with everyone in your organization. Like it or not, video conferencing is the name of the game (until we can teleport, at least). And according to a recent study conducted by the University of Michigan, video conferencing is simply the best alternative to meeting with someone “in real life.” The study compared three communication types--video, audio and text--and measured the effectivness of collaboration and communication in the different modes. Video conferencing ranked as the next best thing to a face to face meeting, with audio following closely behind. Meanwhile, text-based solutions like email and chat performed poorly, offering still more evidence that remote workers do indeed need to see and hear each other to forge lasting connections and fertile working relationships.
But let’s loop back around to our original point about real life vs. video. Those little frailties that engender vulnerability might not be as readily apparent in video conferencing, but viewed from a certain angle, video conferencing creates a similarly intimate and beneficially awkward space. There is something a little bit unnerving about a video conference, right? You worry about how you look on screen. You fret about whether or not the mics are working. You become hyper-aware of yourself as a sort of performer. These can be uncomfortable feelings, but they can and should be embraced, for they remind you that you are still a human being talking to other human beings, and that you all care enough to care about what everyone else thinks.
Yes, this is a call to action of sorts. A call to be awkward and a little bit shy. A call to trust your colleagues to notice all the little things that make conversations tricky and to chalk them up to the simple fact of being human. And this is a reminder that video conferencing can be complicated, and that that is a good thing.
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