Can virtual communication replace face-to-face meetings?

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Working time-and-place independently does not mean that collaboration with colleagues, teams or customers decreases. Collaboration still plays an important role in everyday work practice. Therefore, an increasing attention is put towards empowering virtual collaboration. In research, virtual collaboration can be divided into three groups: computer-mediated collaboration such as emails, chats and document sharing, audio conferencing and video conferencing. Although, there are plenty of tools that empower workers for virtual collaboration, face-to-face meetings are still considered as the most effective. The face-to-face meeting allows to demonstrate or show instead of only talking and visual sense helps to gather and understand information faster. People are able to read the body language of others, hence make a better connection with the team. Body language and keeping eye contact becomes an issue during video conferencing  when there is no possibility to see others but only the shared document. Therefore, it becomes difficult to receive the message as well as understand how the message is received.

Various studies of technology-enabled collaboration suggest that video conferencing is the most efficient for five to eight participants. In larger groups attention to the body language is lost. It might be one of the reasons why video conferencing is not appreciated by organisations in the same way as face-to-face meetings. So when the size of the group for video conferencing increases, different video features should become available to optimize the communication such as multi-screens where more people can be seen and each decides where to concentrate the attention itself. Suitable video systems in dedicated rooms can solve this issue but it is still difficult with the Internet based conference tools, e.g. Skype.

Another change happening in organisations is that more and more meetings are adopting free-flowing group exchanges instead of traditional one-to-many presentations. It becomes increasingly difficult to identify which person is talking, thus the efficiency of meetings decreases. The variety of synchronous meetings with different tools is both a technical and a social challenge for our collaboration and our experiences with them are worth to share - in good and bad.

Asynchronous communication is also taking place by using various tools. We all have experienced the misuse of common tools such as emails when one forgets to attach the file to the email, replies to all recipients when it concerns only a one person or forgets to switch off auto-reply message. Although it distracts us and does not improve our work efficiency, we still use emails every day. A video by comedians Tripp and Tyler is a very good illustration of problems that every user experienced at least once while using video conference. We have adapted to use the various tools technically and based on our experiences we could more discuss what kind of behavioral codes are typical for us in virtual collaboration.

Virtual collaboration is not a silver bullet for mobile workers. Some researches show that video conferencing cannot replace face-to-face communication in tasks like negotiation. One of the options which could help solving issues related to virtual collaboration, is training workers how to use computer-mediated communication tools properly. Such initiatives could be the standardization of lexicon or communication practices. Another option is a development of services for unified communications (UC). Unified communications is a fast growing market which is driven by the increase of mobility and virtual work as well as BYOD phenomenon. Capabilities of unified communications such as a single-number reach for mobile workers by simply dialing their office number, whether they’re in the office or not should be carefully studied by real estate and service providers in order to offer smart services supporting time-and-place independent work. Demand and markets are there.