The Power of Face to face

In this modern-day digital age, there’s a case to be made for communicating via video conferences, phone calls, and emails. Traveling to attend in-person meetings can be stressful, not to mention time consuming and expensive.

A white paper by Verizon found a five-person meeting conducted in-person (involving plane travel for four of the attendees) is over seven times more expensive than a meeting conducted by audio conference and three times as expensive as a video conference.

Yet, despite their clear advantages in terms of efficiency, monetary savings, and convenience, audio and video conferences may not provide the same impact that a face-to-face meeting can provide. 

Perhaps that’s why 87 percent of those surveyed by Verizon said they most prefer to meet in-person, and in-person meetings were ranked as more productive than their virtual counterparts.

“In-Person Meetings Allow Your Brain to Synchronize with Others”

Researchers from Beijing Normal University pointed out that face-to-face communication differs from other forms of communication in two key ways:

• Face-to-face communication involves the integration of “multi-modal sensory information,” such as nonverbal cues (facial expressions, gestures, etc.)
• Face-to-face communication involves more continuous turn-taking behaviors between partners, which has been shown to play a pivotal role in social interactions and reflects the level of involvement of a person in the communication

These factors are critical to effective communication and may even play a role in helping to synchronize your brain with others in your conversation. In fact, research has shown a significant increase in the neural synchronization between the brains of two partners during face-to-face, but not during other types of, conversation.

Interestingly, this neural synchronization is also thought to play a key role in leader emergence, with those emerging as leaders synchronizing their brain activity with followers to a greater degree than occurs between followers and other followers.

The Unconscious Elements of Face-to-Face Meetings May Trump Even Language

Researchers from MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, including Alex Pentland and colleagues, have further revealed that face-to-face meetings allow members to come up with more ideas and become more capable as a group compared to virtual meetings.

As Newsweek reported:

“The deep, often unconscious elements of in-person interaction are more important than language. Pentland and his team have studied hundreds of groups in face-to-face meetings where participants wear sociometric badges, unobtrusive devices that record unspoken social signals.

Pentland’s remarkable finding is that ‘usually we can completely ignore the content of discussions and use only the visible social signals to predict the outcome of a negotiation or a sales pitch, the quality of group decision making, and the roles people assume within the group.’ 

You might argue that you can still “read” a person’s facial expressions over video chat, but research suggests something is still lost in translation. For instance, in a study of brainstorming sessions done face-to-face, over the phone, or via video chat, the face-to-face sessions produced significantly more creative ideas. Face-to-face pairs generated about 30 percent more ideas than virtual pairs.

Face-to-Face Meetings Are Best for Creativity

Meeting in person allows for increased eye contact, which builds increased trust and encourages group members to confide in and co-create with their group. Research published in the International Journal of Organizational Design and Engineering found

“ … The more team members directly interact with each other face-to-face, and the more they trust other team members, the more creative and of higher quality the result of their teamwork is.”

The power of face-to-face meetings has not been lost on some of the most successful corporations in the world. The late Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, is said to have designed work spaces in order to force people to have more in-person interactions.

Google also serves its employees free food in cafeterias, in part to encourage them to stay on campus and mingle with their co-workers over lunch. Yahoo even made headlines in 2013 for, controversially, banning telecommuting for its employees.

""Face To Face Drives Better Outcomes, More Creativity and Stronger Relationships"

Business has so much to gain from the effective use of face to face meetings and gatherings, as you can see below-

At GDS Group are leaders in supporting digital transformation, and we believe heavily in the power of face to face and the value of peer discussion. We bring together industry leaders to discuss, debate and discover paths to realise transformation.

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More more information on how to harness the power of face to face reach out at [email protected]