For more than 10 years, I have been working virtually, as a consultant and as a user. The question of the difference between in-person and virtual collaboration has always had different facets: One is explorative “What can you do better in-person and what virtually? The other takes a rather normative angle: “In-person is ultimately the better, more effective, more agreeable and thus preferable way of working together”.
To clarify what we mean by virtual versus in-person: For us, the term “virtual” refers to the use of internet-based media for activities to collaborate on a permanent basis. It does not include the occasional sending or receiving of emails for information purposes. However, it also means that people who work together do so from different locations and/or cannot meet in the same place on a regular basis.
As the opposite of virtual, we prefer the term “in-person” and try to avoid the commonly used “face-to-face”, because today’s technical capabilities allow for virtual meetings in which people meet in real time face-to-face with good audio and video connection.
Over time, countless publications and blog posts have been written on this subject. The “Digital Nomad” community does not tire of writing travel and work reports describing the advantages and ease of virtual work. For the reader, these trigger pictures of working on the beach or connecting from Airbnb apartments in the most beautiful areas of the world. Thus, generating the impression that virtual work is more about the realization of life dreams for a few privileged people and does not seem to relate to hard bread-making normal jobs, in which most employees see themselves.
Of course, there are companies, that fully rely on virtuality for a variety of reasons: Saving office costs, catering for special staff needs, the worldwide distribution of their work teams. However, we also have heard of organizations that have discontinued this approach and ordered their employees to return to their office.
Then, many companies and organizations have introduced “home office” contracts with their employees, which are very varied in structure even more in practice. Here, views on leadership, control and self-control play a role. We hear different arguments in this discussion, mostly based on believes rather than facts or proof. The general assumption is that home office users work less than those who come to the office every day. “Once a problem arises that needs to be solved immediately, those who are at the local office will be called upon to solve it and not the people working in home office”. Still, several studies show that remote workers are more productive or at least as productive as their on-site colleagues, therefore also the employer benefits from these new ways of working.
What’s the situation today? Virtual work has become a common way of working next to the co-located working style that is here to stay. Some tasks and projects simply cannot be done otherwise, because one would not get the necessary dispersed people on board. Furthermore, many organizations have drastically reduced their travel budgets (on the grounds that staff members can meet virtually).
So, it’s really not an “either-or”, rather an “as-well-as” decision.
Virtual work is still relatively new, and we have not developed a generally agreed behavioral culture for this new style. There are personal, technical and organizational aspects to consider. It seems, that certain personality traits either support virtual work or impede it. If you don’t like to work on your own, if you have a hard time to discipline yourself, to keep yourself from procrastinating, then you might work more effectively together with your colleagues in the office. If you are ok with organizing yourself, you might enjoy virtual work a lot and benefit from its advantages.
Virtual collaboration is determined even more than in-person collaboration by technical and organizational conditions, both at the virtual worker’s domestic work environment and at the company, which provides technical resources, sets rules and regulations. Yes, I admit, that I am sometimes annoyed when I work virtually with colleagues who are distracted by their work environment (kids and dogs that need attention!) or who have to retire to a room in which the router unfortunately no longer provides a sufficient Internet connection. Virtual meetings from quasi-public spaces such as open-plan offices, hotel lobbies, car or train journeys are usually stressful for both sides of the line. The disadvantages of virtual forms of communication are often associated with poor technical and logistical conditions. And rightly so. One problem is that virtual meetings are often not taken as seriously as in-person meetings. And, there simply are often too many virtual meetings planned in daily schedules, often one after another. Team members show up late and feel less guilty for being late, because they don’t feel as “close” to the other persons as they would if they were in the same “room”.
My personal believes around the topic of virtual vs. in-person are based on my own experience in our (virtual) organization Radical Inclusion – a consultancy. We have more than 10 years of experience in working virtually. We collaborate, we earn money, we have to spend and distribute money, we have to settle conflicts, we develop our concepts, and all this not even meeting once a year. Brazil, the USA and Europe represent distances that are not easily bridged. We trust each other and we have become good friends. Yes, all this is possible when virtual collaboration is taken seriously.
We have developed procedures to make virtual collaboration effective, partly born out of the necessity to achieve goals even without in-person meetings, partly because we have discovered that virtual collaboration also has some advantages, in particular the quick iteration between me-time, thinking and reflecting on my own, we-time, the fast exchange in talking to or chatting with a colleague, and us-time, the meeting with the whole team. All this without wasting time travelling between physical destinations. And, maybe even more important, improving your carbon balance.
The advantages, however, can only bear fruit, if the features of virtual tools are used properly and are integrated into the team and collaboration process.
Still, we recommend to also including in-person meetings in project work and team collaboration. If you have the opportunity, use it!
Here are a few tips to make the best use of in-person meetings.
In-person meetings and workshops can last longer than virtual meetings without participants getting exhausted. This potentially allows for more in-depth discussions and a better response to emotional cycles that a team needs to go through and that usually span over several hours. Conflicts can be made “hotter” in order to make certain topics workable, and this is sometimes a precondition to reach a consensus. In principle, all this can also be achieved virtually, but it requires a thoroughly designed virtual communication process and a significant degree of moderation experience.
In in-person meetings, the focus should be on the experience of the overall persona of the participants: Seeing, smelling, the non-verbal impressions, the shared experience. Make use of the quick switch of settings between a dialogue of two people, small group conversations, and whole group activities.
For both types of meetings avoid lengthy presentations. It is better to send the facts in advance or place them on a common virtual platform, give a short introduction in the meeting and start a dialogue right away.
As you can see: It is all about careful preparation and moderation. We always point out that the communication and meeting process of a team or project is a complete oeuvre. All forms of communication and platforms should be included in a purposeful way: Some synchronous – where all participants interact simultaneously in either virtual or in-person meetings, and also some asynchronous, where each team member participates in the communication process on a virtual platform, at their own time and place. A good concept uses all options available. Every meeting should be well prepared: The goal of the meeting has to be clear, only members who can genuinely contribute to the task are to participate, agenda is set up and sent out before the meeting.
Once all this has been taken care of, the question of what is better, in-person or virtual, can be reframed as: Which specific advantages of the different meeting and communication spaces best serve my specific purposes? This leads us away from our focus on communication deficits to a more potential-oriented approach to pursue our collaboration goals.
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