Establishing More Standards and Rules: Study on Video Conferences

The Corona crisis has significantly boosted mobile working arrangements. To this day, zoom or teams meetings remain the primary form of exchange in many organisations. ‘By and large, collaborating online with one’s own team works quite smoothly by now’, says Prof. Dr Sonja Utz, head of the IWM’s Everyday Media lab. However, contacts outside the team are also important: ‘Without them, our thoughts tend to become compartmentalised, and our creativity decreases’, emphasises Prof. Utz, who, together with her colleague Linda-Elisabeth Reimann, investigated participants’ active behaviour in video conferences with strangers in a study recently published in the journal Social Science Computer Review.

The results suggest that organisations should pay more attention to the possibilities and challenges online environments present in terms of technology and communication. According to the researchers, standards, rules or conventions that provide guidance to participants could help improve the quality of interaction in video conferences.
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