Behaviour lesson: Eye contact is the secret sauce of successful meetings

A recent study shows that 96% of all companies in India are now back in office, in some capacity. But this does not mean that these companies have gone back to their old 9-to-5 work schedules.

In many companies, more so in the knowledge sector, hybrid work has become the new norm. So, with many employees working from home, many meetings are happening over virtual meeting platforms.

Many corporates are concerned about the carbon footprints of their employees’ air travel, even as corporate training modules are often run online. Such developments ensure that virtual meetings and classrooms are today’s reality.

Given the fact that travelling for a meeting within most Indian metropolises could take several hours, online meetings are a huge saving of time and effort.

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But do these savings in terms of fuel charges and time taken (with traffic-jam avoidance usually a big bonus in itself) justify virtual meetings replacing face-to-face meetings? Can virtual meetings engage participants to the same degree as in-person meetings?

To answer that question, researchers at Yale School of Medicine used a novel method of measuring the brain activity of meeting participants. This is an area of research called ‘neuroscience of two.’ It is the study of how two brains interact and share information.

It involves measuring the neural activity of two people simultaneously. As part of the Yale study, researchers had one set of subjects sit across from each other and interact face-to-face and had another set of subjects interact via digital screens, as in a virtual meeting.

The researchers studied the brain activity of the subjects as they interacted with the opposite party, using eye-tracking, EEG brain wave measurement and functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the study found that participants in virtual meetings do not engage with other participants to the same degree as in-person meetings. Virtual meetings produced substantially less activity in brain areas associated with facial processing and social interaction.

The eye tracking data showed that people spent more time looking at real faces than virtual faces. Notably, brain-activity measures showed “increased cross-brain synchrony” and higher signal strength levels for in-person interaction.

Experienced professionals always knew that face-to-face meetings are better for building relationships, having detailed discussions and handling sensitive issues.

While handling sensitive issues, even a shake of the head, just a momentary twitch of the face could communicate a lot. In-person meetings allow for better interpretation of non-verbal cues and improved communication.

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As the studies show, the superiority of face-to-face over virtual meetings predominantly emanates from the superior eye-to-eye contact that happens in the physical format. How can online platforms use this crucial observation to improve meeting effectiveness?

According to Zoom’s latest data, 42% of call participants don’t have their camera on during virtual meetings. This is a bigger problem among Gen Z app users, with 63% of them in the ‘camera off’ camp, even though they are the generation who prefer video meetings most.

With the visual system accounting for nearly 90% of our brain processes, switched off cameras drastically reduce the effectiveness of a virtual meeting.

Territoriality, the tendency to defend one’s turf against any intrusion, is a behaviour trait that humans share with many other animals. Switching off the camera is a way to protect one’s personal space from intrusion.

Employees need to be educated that this is a serious impediment to building emotional connections with other team members and increasing mutual trust and cooperation.

Virtual meeting platforms have added many features like screen sharing, recording capabilities and interactive elements such as polls, chats and breakout rooms. There is even a noise-cancellation feature. But the quality of eye contact we get from present-day online platforms leaves much to be desired.

This problem is worse when the meeting involves a slide presentation. On many a virtual meeting platform, all that the presenter sees while displaying one’s slides is the slide on the screen. Just imagine the plight of presenters who must make an entire presentation with absolutely no eye contact with members of the audience!

The designers of these online meeting platforms have not thought through what the presenter needs to see most, and likewise, what the audience most needs to see during a presentation.

The presenter should see the faces of those in the audience, especially their eyes, while the audience should see the slides’ contents above all, but should also be able to see the reactions of other meeting participants to those slides.

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We are living in times when machines have begun to perform better than humans even at mind-involving office jobs. But unfortunately, virtual meeting platforms are still struggling to replicate what humans do well without the aid of technology.

Many of these virtual meeting platforms were scrambled together for the covid pandemic. There has been no significant change in their design since then. Now that we know virtual meetings are here to stay, these platforms ought to be redesigned. Above all, they must focus on the quality of eye contact in virtual meetings.