The realities of 21st century work life, especially post 2008, means many of us have more virtual meetings than face-to-face ones.  That represents a huge shift in organizational life in less than a generation.  Of course, the purveyors of the high-tech equipment that makes these meetings possible tout the benefits – efficiency, speed, savings on travel, and so on.  These are undeniable.   

But what are the problems with this sea change in human behavior?  I can see 5 major issues; in this blog post, I’ll address these problems.  In the following blog post, I’ll talk about how to mitigate them. 

But first, a brief discussion of the mind.  Very brief, I promise.   

In fact, we have several minds, but we’re only aware of one of them.  We have a conscious mind – that’s the one we’re aware of, by definition – and it can handle roughly 40 bits of information a second.  That sounds like a lot until you know about our second mind, the unconscious mind in your head:  it can handle 11 million bits of information a second.

There’s a third mind in your gut with about the same number of neurons a cat has, connected to your head and sending it signals, like “Hey, you’ve got butterflies in your stomach,” that regularly reach the unconscious mind and sometime the conscious one.

That tiny conscious mind – only 40 bits of information per second – easily gets overwhelmed.  Like when you try to walk, chew gum, and send a text message at the same time. 

So we’ve evolved to push down into the unconscious brain as much activity as we can in order to free up that puny little conscious mind to do important stuff like audio-conferences and PowerPoint. 

One of the things we’ve pushed down there into the unconscious mind is reading other people’s intent, their emotional attitude toward what they’re doing.  Now that’s important because we want to know what people intend just as much we want to know what they’re saying – in fact, even more so.  And we get that information mostly from body language.

Your unconscious mind handles the chore of sensing other people’s attitudes and intents from body language.  And because the way the brain remembers things is to attach emotion to them, if there’s no intent or emotion, we don’t remember much.

So the first big problem with virtual communication is that it’s very hard to remember anything we hear in this way without that second stream of information our unconscious mind constantly feeds us about intent and emotion.  Most of that comes through body language, and most of that is cut out over the phone, and so instantly that means that our minds our not fully engaged, we can’t read the emotional subtext very well, and we therefore can’t remember much of what we hear. 

The second big problem is related to the first.  Attention spans are getting shorter, and some recent research by John Medina suggests it may be as short as 10 minutes.  But habit dictates that meetings are usually scheduled in hour-long segments.  Some even longer.  So our meetings, especially virtual ones, are outstripping our attention spans. 

The third big problem is that you don’t have the social cues that indicate when your audience is puzzled, or lost, or interested, or bored – little of that gets through.  A good meeting chairperson will constantly sense the atmosphere in the room and react accordingly – in a face-to-face meeting.  That’s impossible in a virtual meeting.

The fourth big problem follows from this one – misunderstandings easily develop when social cues are absent.  We’ve all experienced the mess you can make with one misinterpreted email, where somebody imagines a tone that you didn’t mean.  The same thing can happen in an audio conference.  For example, does the silence in response to what you’ve just said mean everyone’s in rapt agreement, or everyone’s tuned out – or people are on mute so that they can have a party?

And the last big problem that develops out of virtual meetings is that the bonding that naturally happens when people meet face-to-face and size each other up, find mutual interests, and fall in love – is lacking.  As a result, commitment – trust – is fragile.

What’s your experience been?  What other problems have you seen?  Next time I’ll talk about how to mitigate these issues. 

With thanks to Ingersoll Rand for inviting me to speak on these issues; this post is a version of that talk.