How effectively can remote teams maintain creativity and collaboration?

It's a question many teams and organizations contend with, especially considering that by some estimates, the remote workforce rose since 2019 from 6 percent to an estimated 22 percent in 2025.

Virtual work offers flexibility, autonomy, and access to global talent. But it can also inadvertently strip away the very give-and-take and casual interactions that fuel creative collaboration. A lot of what seems accidental, such as informal conversations, spontaneous banter, and those seemingly aimless chats, actually spark insights and valuable ideas.

When teams don't have moments to connect beyond the meeting agenda or digital communication, creative capacity can suffer.

Still, teams, leaders, and organizations can boost virtual team creativity. It just takes intention, experimentation, and a genuine willingness to connect.

Recent research shows what can happen when teams go remote. A 2022 study in Nature Human Behaviour by Horvát and Uzzi synthesizes field and lab studies on videoconferencing and idea generation. Their work shows that video-based communication, while efficient, narrows our visual and cognitive attention. When people meet virtually, they tend to focus on just one speaker, rather than scanning the room, reading subtle cues, and building off one another's energy. As a result, teams generate fewer and less diverse ideas.

When you look at screens for hours each day, your cognitive resources and perception of what is real and possible literally narrow. So does your creative intelligence. Creative intelligence includes your innate capacity to generate and ideate both novel and........

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