The missing connection in remote working

Virtual meetings prevent us from communicating effectively. They demand excessive cognitive load, leading to exhaustion and burnout.

Virtual meetings consist of a compressed reproduction of our voices and (let’s face it) a terribly lit and distorted reproduction of our faces. We have to remember that we’re not seeing a true depiction of our colleagues when speaking virtually. We spend significant amounts of mental energy subconsciously filling in the gaps in stimulus that we’re used to experiencing when chatting with another person.

The choice of words in a conversation represents as little as just 7% of the message we wish to express. The rest is down to body language and tone of voice.

In a shared space, a conversation between two people is so much more than the words that are exchanged. Body language, facial expressions, hand gestures, eye contact and tone of voice play a significantly bigger part in communicating a message. Studies by psychologist Albert Mehrabian have shown that in some cases, the choice of words can equate to as little as 7% of the total perceived message given off by somebody when talking. 38% of the remaining message is perceived by the tone of voice, and a whopping 55% is driven by body language (Mehrabian, 1967).

As we’re used to natural conversations, the lack of stimuli available in a virtual meeting creates a sense of ambiguity.

Ambiguity is when something is open to more than one interpretation, like “it could be this, or it could be that”. Subconsciously, our minds are constantly making quick decisions on how to interpret the world around us. The less information we put in, the more our minds have to work to paint the full picture.

When under stress, we subconsciously assume a negative interpretation of anything ambiguous.

Psychologists Clair Lawson and Colin MacLeod have found that people under stress display a negative bias in interpretation, i.e. they assume the worst. Their studies also spotted a pattern of this behaviour in those suffering from depression (Lawson and MacLeod, 1999).

An abstract neural pathway map showing ambiguity’s role in the erosion of individual mental health and the social fabric of society.

Ref: Palamarchuk, Iryna S, Mental Resilience and Coping With Stress: A Comprehensive, Multi-level Model of Cognitive Processing, Decision Making, and Behavior, Frontiers in Behavioural Neuroscience, Ottawa, Canada, 6th August 2021

Our memories are a blur of facts and assumptions, so we create and believe in unrealistically negative opinions of our colleagues’ character.

Learn to recognise this and your world will become a much nicer place to be.