Concurrents – Environmental Psychology: Why Face-to-Face Still Matters – Communicating With More Than Words

by Sally Augustin, Ph.D. | August 3rd, 2020

During the work from home epoch, one of the most common topics of discussion among employees was how much they all wanted to be in the same physical space again, interacting face-to-face. Some of the reason for this was, almost definitely, frustrating experiences with Zoom and Teams and Skype and all of the other technology platforms that are generally very useful but have been pushed to their capacity limits – with at least occasional human errors to blame for difficult online interactions. Even when we perfect electronic communication tools, and we all really do understand how to operate them effectively, humans will still be driven to interact in-the-flesh, face-to-face. In the Harvard Business Review, MIT researchers Ratti and Claudel (2016) report that, “Today’s technology does allow global and instantaneous communication, but most of us still commute to offices for work every day…What early digital commentators missed is that even if we can work from …