Conference calls are a waste of time without human emotion. Here’s how to fix them.

Have you ever put a conference call on mute while talking to a colleague at your desk or while doing the dishes or checking Facebook? Then why do you keep booking hour-long conference calls and expecting people to stay focused the whole time? When we can’t see each other, we can’t rely on unconscious cues to let us know when the group is drifting and everyone needs a break. Virtual communication requires us to make an extra effort to be connected in human ways to our colleagues and to think through when and how we’re reaching people — is this email arriving right before my colleague is sitting down to dinner? — because it doesn’t happen naturally in the virtual space.

One of the cardinal virtues of email and its descendant, texting, was supposed to be that it was asynchronous, meaning I could send you my note in the middle of night when I was unable to sleep, and you could read it comfortably over your morning coffee. But mobile phones and being always-connected means that, for most people most of the time, we are constantly being pinged by texts and emails and other forms of interruptions that demand a quick response. I’ve also noted that whereas in the past you could respond to an email, say, in a few days and still be considered polite, now you’ll get a follow-up email a few hours later if you don’t respond almost immediately.

For the human who craves real connection—and that’s most of us—virtual communicating is deeply unpleasant. Why? The normal cues that we get in face-to-face communications are largely missing. The result is an emotional void. Every face-to-face communication is two simultaneous conversations: the content (what you say) and the body language (how you say it). Both these conversations are essential to human communication, but they are very different. The content is the stuff of everyday chitchat, high-level planning, offers of employment and marriage, negotiations to end wars, and secret deals to share marketplaces around the world. The second conversation is far simpler and far more important in one sense: if the two conversations are not aligned, then the second one always trumps the first. We’ve all had the experience of saying one thing and meaning another. Sometimes, we want to convey something else, and other times, we want to hide something.

Let’s look at the result by putting ourselves in a common scenario.

It’s Monday morning. It’s time for the usual team conference call. You have them every Monday morning at 10:00 Eastern Standard Time because that’s 3:00 p.m. (mid-afternoon) for the UK team, mid-morning for the New York team, and not too early for the California contingent. Actually, the 7:00 a.m. start was fine for Jake back when he was the only member of the team on the West Coast, because he drove into the office every weekday morning at 6:00 a.m. to miss most of the notorious Los Angeles traffic. And as other teammates were added in LA, they were socialized to fit Jake’s—and the rest of the team’s—schedule. Now Jake has gone, but no one has bothered to change the habit, and the time has remained the same.

You’re the moderator and you start the call promptly at 10:00 a.m. from the New York office. The UK team is late signing on because of a work lunch that had something to do with a new group being added there. You knew this and decided to go ahead because you wanted to introduce the new marketing concept that is going to be so important for selling the new gadget and that everyone needs to understand. The UK team members were instrumental in developing the slide deck, so you presumed that they could catch up easily enough.

You sign on to the company conference line, but because of a screw-up, you have to change the invite to a Webex conference bridge. This change delays things a bit more because you have to send out the instructions to everyone via email. Naturally, not everyone picks up the email in time; a few stragglers never do find out, and so the ultimate roll call is incomplete.

But you finally get the call going and ask if everyone has the slide deck. A few people in LA, and even one or two in the New York office, don’t seem to have gotten the memo. There goes another seven minutes sorting that out.

Finally, everyone has the deck, and maybe it was even a good thing that the meeting started late because the UK team has rolled in from lunch at last and is in good spirits. The first thing one of them says is that the first word on the first slide is misspelled.

You bridle. You’re a bit of perfectionist, and anyway, you want this rollout to go well and you want people to be impressed. If they’re obsessing about typos — heck, if they’re even looking for typos — you’re going to be in trouble.

They may be saying it with a smile, but you can’t see the smile.

“What do you mean?” you ask. “I’ve spell-checked this thing a dozen times. Where?”

Ian chuckles. “Color. C-o-l-o-u-r.”

Oh, he’s making a joke about English versus American spelling. Great. Funny. The future of the company is at stake, and he’s debating Noah Webster’s attempts to modernize English spelling for Americans in the nineteenth century.

“Thanks, Ian,” you say. “Go back to sleep.” You wince. The comment just slipped out, but Ian will take it as a reference to the time he fell asleep in a meeting in the United States, thanks to jet lag, one of the last face-to-face meetings the team could afford to have, a couple of years ago. People have been reminding him of it ever since, and it’s not really a joke. The president of the company dropped by just at the wrong moment, and Ian’s career chances took a sudden nosedive.

Because you can’t see each other, you can’t put a little psychic salve on the situation by smiling to show that you didn’t mean it.

Indeed, things go ominously quiet from the UK end.

You pause and take a deep breath. Maybe it’s a good time to ask all the team members what they think? No, it’s too early. You need to get back on track and finish the slide deck. You don’t even know if everyone has had a chance to look at the thing, so it’s essential that you go through it to get everyone at the same level.

But where are they in their attention levels and engagement? Recent studies show that on a typical conference call, over 60 percent of the supposed participants are doing email, other work, going to the bathroom, shopping, exercising, or eating—or even taking another call.

It’s not a pretty picture. Over 80 percent of teams and 90 percent of projects have at least one team member not physically in the same location as the other workers. The number of workers who work from home at least one day a week has increased by 79 percent from 2005 to 2012.

We are experiencing an epidemic of emotional isolation. But the issue is not simply that we can’t see each other because we’re not in the same physical place. If that were all there were to it, then Skype and Google Hangouts would solve all our virtual isolation issues.

We’re only beginning to understand the full extent of how our unconscious minds gather information about the world around us and, specifically, the people around us. In the interests of efficiency and through the historical accident of invention, we’ve adopted a system of digital communication that is deeply unsatisfying for us humans, because it doesn’t allow us to gather and exchange the information that we want in the way that we’re used to.

But even more important, our digital communication prevents us from connecting emotionally with our fellow humans. That (largely) unconscious emotional connection is a key aspect of our human information gathering and sharing system. Indeed, it’s hardwired in us. Without it, the information is far poorer, far less generous, and far more often misunderstood. In fact, it’s usually incoherent.

A team of Italian researchers was studying the basic workings of the brain, using monkeys as subjects, in the 1990s. The researchers were interested in several aspects of the brain, and as they worked with the monkeys, the scientists gave out peanuts — a snack the monkeys loved — as rewards for good behavior. The peanuts caused the monkeys’ pleasure circuits to light up, as the machines they were hooked up to showed. One researcher ate a peanut himself rather than give it to the monkey, which could see both the offending researcher and the peanut. Rather than experiencing anger, as you might expect, the monkey apparently felt pleasure: the pleasure circuits of the animal’s brain lit up just as if the monkey had received the peanut itself.

This astonishing result led to much more research. In the end, the team discovered that when we (and monkeys) see someone else experience an emotion, that same emotion fires in our heads — thanks to what the team called mirror neurons. The far more powerful and important source of empathy, then, is these mirror neurons. Our brains themselves produce in our own heads the same emotions that we witness in people around us. A set of clues coming to us in the visual and wider sensory field, and in the tone of voice of the people near us, causes us to mirror excitement, anger, joy, or terror back to the people who are experiencing it themselves.

This is what human connection really is: the hard wiring in our brains forces us to feel the same emotion that other people around us feel. We crave this emotional connection because we’re hardwired to experience it, and we suffer when it’s removed. In the virtual space, mirror neurons don’t fire, because they don’t get the information they need to do so.

So are there ways to improve the experience of connection in virtual situations? Can we buck the communications tide and reverse the downward spiral of misunderstanding, boredom, and ineffectiveness? Cogito Corporation, a spinoff of MIT’s media lab, is working on precisely that question. Practically, what can we do to restore some of the connection that the virtual world takes out?

There are a couple of ways to improve the dismal experience of audio conferences, webinars, and even “telepresence rooms” and other forms of visual virtual connection. We have a whole set of unconscious behaviors that help regulate the flow of ordinary conversation. We make eye contact, we nod, we lean forward, we wave our hands—and we do all these things without being aware of them, and without being aware of others doing them too. But these behaviors are extraordinarily helpful in making conversation seem smooth, avoiding endless interruptions, and allowing everyone a chance to feel heard.

Without those unconscious clues, you need to develop an equivalent set of conscious ones. You need to become exceedingly conscious about taking turns and allowing others to do so. People signal each other, for example, in ordinary conversation when they are nearly ready to stop talking. In effect, they’re telling the other person, “Almost done. Get ready, because it’s almost your turn.”

Lacking that visual clue, you might put it into your conversation consciously. “I’m almost done here, so let me turn the conversation over to you after one more comment.” Something like that. It might seem hopelessly artificial, but the alternative is something we’ve all suffered through—the endless interruptions, apologies for interruptions, and awkward silences that make up a team meeting on the phone.

Similarly, you can help determine the pacing and give-and-take of a virtual conversation with deliberate clues about the length of turns and the handoffs. “Let’s each take about one minute to comment on this point that Geoff has raised, going around the team in order by time zone. Jane, do you want to start?”

Again, that sort of mediating may seem like hard work, but the alternative is far more irritating for everyone. And exhausting. People regularly report on the creative ways they have come up with to tune out audio conferences, from personal grooming to exercising to even flipping back and forth between more than one conversation.

Second, the emotions we can convey effortlessly when we are face-to-face can to a certain extent be added back into a virtual conversation by consciously varying the pitch and pacing of your voice. We signal excitement (and stress) by speaking faster and raising our pitch. By slowing down and lowering your pitch, you can indicate the opposite—authority and calm. You can do this consciously, with some effort and a good deal of practice. Learning to put back in the emotions that the virtual world strips out of our communications is an essential survival skill in the twenty-first century.

Nick Morgan is the author of Can You Hear Me?: How to Connect with People in a Virtual World, from which this article is adapted.