Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation - Nature

Microsoft says meeting time has TRIPLED since 2020: typical workers are spending 57% of their time communicating [meetings, calls] with others: 'Today, knowledge work is, quantitatively speaking, less about creating new things than it is about talking about those things.’ https://t.co/aueW97bOrg

This is the big one. If you’re conducting blue sky imagineering improv meetings on a regular basis, that’s very tough to pull off remotely. There’s something about the physical presence of people in a room, seeing their faces, hearing their voices, watching their body language, that is far more conducive to quickly bouncing ideas around and figurin... See more

In a virtual meeting, all eyes are focused on screens and ignore the environment, which "constrains the associative process underlying idea generation,".

As Matt Clancey points out that “the benefits of knowledge spillovers from being physically close to other knowledge workers have been falling and may no longer exist in many domains of knowledge.” This is a controversial claim, but Clancey provides a detailed review of multiple studies that address this matter from different directions.