A few months into the pandemic, remote working looked very different to how it does now. We saw our coworkers lives, saw their kids and their pets. We cut each other a lot of slack as we adjusted and experimented with this new way of being with each other. We tried different ways of presenting decks in video calls. We played with StreamDecks and multi-camera setups. We said, "Let's turn our cameras off for this one". In workshops we asked people to bring in items around them as inspiration, and we sent each other props and tools to use. We went on walking meetings.
I've tried really hard to keep up this variety and experimentation but I feel like in most parts of the knowledge working world, it's stopped. It doesn't seem to matter whether you're at home or in the office, it's all back to back calls, walking through slides, and the occasional Miro board to liven things up.
People can argue for days about the productivity benefits of remote, in-person, and hybrid work, but few pause to wonder about their impact on one of the key drivers of productivity: creativity. The monotonous meeting culture I see across businesses gives me cause for concern. As does the off-the-shelf opinion that in-person, synchronous collaboration is the best environment for creativity. I want to see if that opinion holds up to some examination.
The case for in-person working as the best environment for creativity
One big argument that in-person working generally improves creativity in an organisation is based on the 'watercooler moment', the serendipitous encounters with colleagues that lead to breakthroughs. These moments, goes the argument, happen less frequently when working remotely. But reading through the academic literature suggests that these moments are mostly mythic, not major contributors to creativity. For creativity specific, problem-oriented discussions are more useful than random encounters.
But being together in the same space certainly has benefits for creativity amongst groups. I'm sure you can recall times when you've waved your arms at a wall where the customer journey you're talking about was once mapped out. Sharing space like that and physically representing information creates shared mental models which can improve creativity in groups. The context dependent memory that we build in these spaces can also help people to combine ideas and information in new ways.
Getting more specifically into the interpersonal dynamics that contribute to creativity, Anita Williams Woolley identifies the 'social perception' of team members as a key predictor of the collective intelligence of the group. What that means is that the more attuned to social cues people in a team are, the better they work together. This is certainly one of the biggest things in-person work has going for it as video calls definitely make spotting social cues harder and this makes working together feel harder. You don't get the burstiness and the psychological safety that leads to creativity.
You can argue that it is much easier to build trust and rapport between people in face-to-face encounters. But you can't argue that psychological safety can't be built and maintained when working remotely. In a line that could be applied to almost anything when we talk about remote work, one research paper concluded that building psychological safety remotely is very doable but, "requires more time, deliberation, and intentionality compared to face-to-face settings".
On that note, let's look at the case for remote work being a better environment than in-person working to do creative work.
The case for remote working as the best environment for creativity
When we're working remotely, we can work from anywhere. That means we can get out of the house and go work in the natural spaces – parks, woods, rivers – which have been shown to increase creativity. Or we can lean into the 'cathedral effect' and work from places with high ceilings which have been shown to increase abstract thinking and creativity. We can work where our customers are, where our competitors are, or simply in places we find inspiring. But to do this we have to get away from the idea that being online – at your desk and on your laptop – is what defines work and we have to think more about creativity and less about productivity.
Creative outputs need lots of different inputs. As a creative director once put it to me, "You can't let the well run dry." When we come together remotely, we bring with us a vast number of diverse inputs from the different environments we each inhabit. If we're smart about how we run our meetings and prompt people to bring these different inputs into the session, we can introduce unexpected combinations and novel inspirations that simply don't exist in your office's conference room.
Pixar encourage their staff to decorate their desks in their own personal style: "virtual shrines to individuality—decorated, adorned, modified in ways that express the quirks and passions of the person who occupies that space". Part of it is about introducing these different inputs into the environment. Part of this is about letting people know it's a safe place to be themselves and bring in those quirks that make for great creative work. We should be the most creatively confident in the safety of our own personal space, but given the opportunity to really show our individuality, most corporate cultures have pushed us to literally take the focus away from our individuality by blurring out our unique environments, mask our lives with fake backgrounds, or design our selves out of our own spaces by ordering books by the yard. Creativity demands unique perspectives and, if we want it in our people, we need to encourage them to be their unique selves in their own space.
Given the need for diverse perspectives, I was surprised to find that there's relatively little research on the impact of remote collaboration on groupthink. So I carried out a small and very unscientific LinkedIn poll to get a sense of how people feel about it. When I asked whether people find it easier to express opinions or ideas that differ from the majority in remote meetings or in-person meetings, 42% said it makes no difference, 42% find it easier in person, and 17% find it easier when collaborating remotely. But when I asked people whether they thought others found it easier to express opinions or ideas that differ from the majority in remote meetings or in-person meetings, the results were flipped. Just 23% said they though others find it easier in-person, 38% think others find it easier in remote meetings, and 38% thought it makes no difference.
Putting aside the obvious drawbacks of a small sample drawn from my LinkedIn network this does hint at a couple of interesting things. It could suggest that people generally don't have an accurate idea of the impact of environment on eliciting different perspectives and opinions. It could be that people report they find it easier in-person because of the prevailing narrative that in-person work is better for collaboration. It could be that because remote groups feel less cohesive, there is a perception that people are more dissenting. More research needed generally but also specifically: just ask the people you work with.
If you've been reading this and been screaming inside, "Surely the best environment for creativity depends on the individual and the type of work they're doing!", then please scream the following with equal intensity: "That's the point!". Clearly blanket RTO mandates are not good for creativity. But even flexible, hybrid approaches to working can improve by not defaulting to an in-person brainstorm when you need creative thinking. Environments to encourage creativity are created by strong team agreements. Agreements that team members will be responsive to each other's queries; that team members can work from anywhere, not just swap between their home and office desks; that the locations for synchronous work will be chosen with consideration for the type of work being done; that you won't be lazy with meetings. Do the work to figure out the places, times, and interactions that foster your creativity, and be honest about that as you figure out what works for your team.
There is no getting away from the fact that remote collaboration requires more time, deliberation, and intentionality than in-person work to foster creativity in a group. But let's be honest, most in-person collaboration needs more time, deliberation, and intentionality than it gets. Both modes of work can be incredibly creative if you're willing to think creatively about them.
References
Successful Remote Teams Communicate in Bursts Is a Return To Office a Return To Creativity? Requiring Fixed Time In Office To Enable Brainstorms and Watercooler Talk May Not Foster Research Creativity - Xu et al., 2023 Procedures and Strategies: Context-dependence in Creativity A comparison of nature and urban environments on creative thinking across different levels of reality The Influence of Ceiling Height: The Effect of Priming on the Type of Processing That People Use Creativity Inc.