In September 2020, six months into the pandemic, The Economist asked: “Is the office finished?” Working from home had rapidly become the new normal, and with conference calls replacing conference rooms, the future of work seemed to be remote-first, forever.

Five years later, it’s clear that although the death of the office has been greatly exaggerated, the technologies we have come to rely on more than ever before—email, Slack and Zoom—are actually making us more aware of the value of in-person communication.

“Humanity is carried on the voice,” the behavioral scientist Nicholas Epley has observed. Pure text, he discovered, lacks the subtle cues that “reveal the presence of a thoughtful and intelligent human being.” In a 2019 study, he found that merely reading an account of someone’s political views—instead of listening to or watching that person speak—made it easier to judge them as “less refined, cultured, rational, logical and sophisticated.” 

Videoconferencing software is an improvement, but it’s not perfect. In a study published in 2020, Melanie S. Brucks and Jonathan Levav—professors at Columbia and Stanford’s business schools, respectively—found that people who brainstormed together on Zoom came up with fewer, less creative ideas than those who brainstormed in person. To appear engaged and present, we typically focus on our screens during videoconferencing calls, and this narrow visual focus leads to a narrow cognitive focus, suppressing creativity. “Virtual interaction,” Brucks and Levav concluded, “uniquely hinders idea generation.”