PEOPLE matters

To travel or not to travel?

Richard Plenty and Terri Morrissey reflect on the 21st century version of Shakespeare’s existential question.

We write this while we are attending the COP30 Climate change conference in Belem, Brazil, as representatives of the Global Psychology Alliance (GPA).

We spent this morning working with others from around the world. This afternoon, we listened to the opening address, in which Brazilian President Lula said ‘people matters’ needed to be at the heart of the change agenda. Regular readers of this column will realise that this
is a view we share!

We’re not actually in Brazil but working from home in different countries (Ireland and the UK), along with colleagues scattered around the world. We are nearly all virtual participants.

We have one in person delegate on the ground in Belem. Yet we still feel a sense of community, connectedness and team cohesion. We share a common purpose.

It is only four years ago that we attended the COP26 conference in Glasgow. At that time our whole delegation attended in person. Since then, the opportunity to attend virtually has expanded, become more formalised and inclusive. The immediate saving in environmental and economic costs, as well as our time, is enormous.

Modern technology has made this possible, transforming how we are able to work and interact – enabling video conferencing, instant messaging, and digital communication across continents.

Remote working, once seen as a poor substitute for ‘being there’, continues to evolve as virtual and augmented reality, together with immersive online platforms, allow people to collaborate, explore, and share experiences in increasingly realistic ways.

Given these circumstances, it is tempting to ask whether in due course we could connect, collaborate, and even live our lives almost entirely online?

Virtual communication offers efficiency and convenience. We could all stay at home rather than have to travel. It could be more flexible, cheaper and less environmentally damaging. But is it likely to work?

It might come at a cost to creativity. An article in Nature in 2022 by Melanie Brucks and Jonathan Leavy found that virtual communication curbed creative idea generation simply because it focused the gaze of communicators on a screen, rather than looking around as they would in in-person groups.

Indeed, moving about is important. The layout of Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, California, was deliberately designed to encourage random encounters and the kind of informal communication that fuels collaboration and innovation.

Exclusively working remotely might also make it more difficult to build trust, which underpins most high performing teams. This is helped by people getting to know each other as individuals rather than images on a screen. How often, for example, have we been surprised by how tall someone is when we meet them in person having worked with them virtually?

Research by UK psychologist Amanda Potter and her team at Zircon shows that in-person teams feel a greater sense of psychological safety than those working remotely.

Professor Alex Haslam, lead author of the groundbreaking book The New Psychology of Leadership, argues that a feeling of ‘belonging’ and shared social identity is key for both personal wellbeing and organisation performance.

It may not work well either on a personal level, where the demand for travel continues to grow. People have a desire to visit new places, go on holiday, and have different experiences whatever the practical difficulties and costs.

Reconnecting with family and friends provides a warmth and quality of shared experience that video calls cannot match. Sometimes we just need to be there.

Still, travel comes at a cost: economic, personal and environmental. The future of connecting people and places lies not in a stark choice between the physical and the virtual, but in choosing carefully what is best suited to the context and circumstances. To travel or not to travel – that is indeed the question.

About the authors

Terri Morrissey and Dr Richard Plenty run ACI’s Human Resources training. They received a Presidential Citation from the American Psychological Association in June 2022 for their leadership in advancing global psychology. Contact them at info@thisis.eu