A number of assumptions about online cooperation come up again and again, in meetings, in the press and among colleagues. Many date from the time when a great many people suddenly had to work online without preparation, good equipment or practised routines. The experiences of that time are real. The conclusions drawn from them often go too far.
These assumptions deserve a calm answer. Those who hold them have usually seen something true and generalised it. That true core is named in each case.
“Trust does not develop online.”
Trust grows out of experiences of reliability: promises are kept, mistakes are admitted, contributions are recognised. These experiences happen online just as they do on site. Research on teams that work together only online describes a trust that forms quickly but remains fragile as long as it is not confirmed by reliable communication (Jarvenpaa and Leidner 1999). A study of how trust develops in computer-mediated groups found that it started lower there but caught up over time (Wilson, Straus and McEvily 2006).
The true core: at the start, trust online needs more deliberate care, because the room supplies less along the way. What that care looks like is described under Good practice.
“Online is impersonal.”
A conversation becomes personal when you experience the other as this particular person, and a video call sometimes offers more for that than a meeting room. That takes good sound, large faces and a short opening round. Often you even see the other person in their own surroundings, with the bookshelf, the view from the window. Families who talk regularly across borders experience this every week.
The true core: large groups without a chair, with cameras off and poor sound, really are impersonal. That can be changed (Live online).
“Without presence, less work gets done.”
Presence measures presence, not work. Whoever assesses performance by results does not need to look into the office. A study at a large Chinese technology company assigned employees at random to two groups: one worked from home two days a week, the other was always in the office. Over two years there were no differences in performance reviews or promotions, and quit rates in the hybrid group fell by about a third (Bloom, Han and Liang 2024). The study concerns a hybrid arrangement, not purely online work, and a single company. But it shows that the equation “less presence, less work” does not hold.
The true core: where tasks and roles are unclear, this shows up faster online. That argues for clarity, not against online.
“Creativity needs a shared room.”
Here a true core is documented. In laboratory experiments and a field study across several countries, pairs working by video call generated fewer creative ideas than pairs in the same room. In selecting the best idea, however, no disadvantage was found. The authors attribute this to the screen narrowing one’s focus (Brucks and Levav 2022).
This suggests how to organise creativity online: ideas are first gathered alone and asynchronously, then selected and developed together live online, since selection showed no disadvantage. And nobody has to look into the camera while thinking. A conversation with sound only, while walking, widens the view again.
“Online is a pandemic stopgap.”
Cooperation online is older than the pandemic. Free software, collaboratively written reference works, international research groups and open-university study have relied on it for decades. The law has known it for longer too: German civil procedure has allowed hearings by audio-visual transmission since 2002, and Section 128a of the Code of Civil Procedure (ZPO) was rewritten in 2024. The pandemic did not invent online; it made many people use it for the first time.
The true core: what happened then, under pressure and without practice, often really was a stopgap. The form is not.
“You have to have met in person at least once.”
Meeting on site is not a necessity. Working groups and friendships last for years without all participants ever being in the same room. What a first meeting is meant to achieve, getting to know each other with no particular purpose, can be done online too: with a first video call without an agenda, a round in which everyone says something about themselves, or a game played together.
The true core: a good meeting can speed up trust. It is an opportunity, not a condition.
“Online is more tiring.”
Many people know the fatigue after a day of video calls. It is real, but it has identifiable causes: too many and too long synchronous meetings without breaks, poor sound that demands constant effort to follow, one’s own picture that one ends up watching all the time. Those who increase the share of asynchronous work, attend to sound, plan breaks and hide the self-view address each of these causes.
The true core: online forgives a badly planned day less readily than the office, where at least one changes rooms between two meetings.
What remains
Almost every one of these misconceptions accurately describes online cooperation done badly. It merely mistakes the execution for the form. That is what makes it useful: it shows what the execution depends on. More under Online and on site.
Sources
- Jarvenpaa, Sirkka L. and Leidner, Dorothy E., Communication and Trust in Global Virtual Teams, Organization Science 10 (1999), 791–815.
- Wilson, Jeanne M., Straus, Susan G. and McEvily, Bill, All in due time: The development of trust in computer-mediated and face-to-face teams, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 99 (2006), 16–33.
- Bloom, Nicholas, Han, Ruobing and Liang, James, Hybrid working from home improves retention without damaging performance, Nature 630 (2024), 920–925, doi:10.1038/s41586-024-07500-2.
- Brucks, Melanie S. and Levav, Jonathan, Virtual communication curbs creative idea generation, Nature 605 (2022), 108–112, doi:10.1038/s41586-022-04643-y.
Read on: Good practice for working together online · Cases