What happens to a well mannered human once they are put behind a piece of glass? All too often they become inconsiderate, disrespectful and even aggressive. It happens when we drive – a December survey found 73% of us have experienced verbal abuse on the road in 2020 – it happens in the comments section online and now it’s happening on video calls.
A sales leader told me recently that after finally securing a Zoom meeting with a major prospective client, she watched her team nail the presentation they’d spent weeks crafting to a customer who was not even listening. “I could see the reflection of the client’s computer screen in her glasses and she was doing her emails – she didn’t even have the slides up on screen.” The team could see it too of course and morale took a big hit.
“The client would never have done that in a face to face meeting,” the sales leader pointed out. “And if she did, I’m confident we could have brought her back and re-engaged her.”
This kind of behaviour is a global trend. “Attendees often interpret virtual meetings as an invitation to multi-task,” observed the Harvard Business Review last July.
So what’s going on? Why did the client feel she had licence to be rude? What makes video calls, like being in a car, an environment that allows us to behave so rudely?
Well, it turns out that biology, and more specifically neurobiology, is to blame. Certain features of face to face interaction that are pretty well impossible to reproduce over video calls are some of the most important in producing the vital ingredient in making us behave with consideration for others.
Oxytocin is the neurochemical transmitter which promotes feelings of trust, affection, and co-operation. It is what Professor Paul Zak calls The Moral Molecule, driving our need to help, and be mindful of people’s feelings.
Not only has oxytocin been vitally important to our evolutionary development, but in a modern business setting, it is one of the strongest influencers of behavioural changes, creating credibility and forming strong stakeholder relationships.
Through our evolutionary journey, humans have developed shortcuts to release oxytocin: clues to indicate another person is worth helping without them having to fight off a bear on our behalf.
These shortcuts include making and sustaining eye-contact – quite hard to do when you’re on camera – and physical contact. In fact sustained eye contact results in synchronised blinking, a sign of neuro-coupling where brain functions closely mirror one another. Neuro-coupling like this establishes empathy by generating high quantities of oxytocin.
Physical contact such as happens during handshakes and hugs are also evolutionary shortcuts for oxytocin release. In fact prolonged physical contact for more than a minute aligns all sorts of bodily functions such as temperature regulation and pulse between two people. Not many meetings are weird enough to have bodily contact for more than a minute (not since the 1970s anyway), but pheromone release can have a similar effect. “When we walk into an in-person meeting, we can immediately sense the individual and collective mood – information that we use (consciously or not) to tailor subsequent interaction,” says Wharton Professor Martine Haas.
Anyone who has not had their empathy centres interfered with by, say, having a lobotomy or being a psychopath, has sensed a moment when they ‘lose’ a room, or when an audience ‘leans in’. What’s happening is that we are sensing the oxytocin being generated around us and gauging empathy. According to Professor Haas, “Having to rely on digital communication erodes transmission of this crucial type of intelligence.”
The fact is, video calls are going nowhere, so we need a work around. We need to find a way to generate that moral molecule, without relying on eye contact, pheromone release or physically induced neuro-coupling.
The good news for everyone (except perhaps Bill Gates) is that there are other hacks we can use and none of them involve powerpoint:
- Engage in dialogue. 2010 Studies by the Royal Society show that almost all mammals release oxytocin when they vocalise. This works in highest volumes when shared experience is established and learning is undertaken, so discussing common interests is a useful technique to build a sense of cooperation, especially where news is being shared.
- Get someone talking about themselves. The release of oxytocin goes up when we talk about ourselves, along with the release of another pleasure hormone: serotonin. This is one of the reasons people warm to you when you really haven’t said very much. Just being a good listener makes you trustworthy.
- Use Storytelling. This is the big one. Astounding work by Princeton’s Uri Hasson has shown that the active neural networks in an engaging storyteller are precisely mirrored in those of the listener. This neuro-coupling goes way beyond language and analytical functions and into the parietal and frontal cortex, influencing emotions and even logical decision making. Neuro-coupling, as we know, floods the brain with oxytocin, which creates empathy, trust and a desire to co-operate. In addition, stories are up to twelve times more memorable than fact based presentations and statistics.
In other words, if the person you’re meeting with gets the chance to talk about themselves, establishes common ground with you and hears a story they can relate to, they feel closer to you, more inclined to help, and have greater trust in your advice. So a powerpoint presentation in a video call might not be the best way to go.
Telling engaging stories might be great at releasing oxytocin but it’s easier said than done. It’s a skill, and not a straightforward one at that.
Paul Smith, former P&G Executive turned Forbes top 100 leadership coach, draws parallels between storytelling and playing the guitar. Sure, there are a gifted few for whom playing music is so natural it seems effortless, but for most of us, some dedicated practice and instruction will have us good enough that we won’t embarrass ourselves if we’re handed the old six-string after dinner.
That’s all we need. To be effective when in-person oxytocin triggers are not available, you don’t have to be the Hendrix of storytelling, but neither should you think you can just pick up the instrument and play. There are rules and techniques to learn.
In customer facing roles, some leadership teams arestruggling with effective internal communications, and HR professionals looking to raise levels of engagement. In most cases they have adopted the meeting styles that worked pre-COVID, when we could shake hands or hug, throw around some small talk, and then present decks of slides, ‘reading the room’ subconsciously as we went.
We now spend a good deal of time looking at how these meeting styles need to be adapted for remote settings. Often it proves helpful to identify how triggers can be built into online meeting structures to achieve certain outcomes. It doesn’t replace content. And it won’t mean every fifteen minutes with a new contact is a sure fire smash. But it does help us understand better how to create stronger relationships when we are geographically distant.
But if you take nothing else away, maybe don’t be so quick to jump into a slide deck on every Zoom call; and maybe stop and think of others before swearing at them in your car!
