In this modern-day digital age, there’s a case to be made for communicating via video conferences, phone calls, and emails. Traveling to attend in-person meetings can be stressful, not to mention time consuming and expensive.

A white paper by Verizon Conferencing found a five-person meeting conducted in-person (involving plane travel for four of the attendees) is over seven times more expensive than a meeting conducted by audio conference and three times as expensive as a video conference.¹

The average attendee also spent 53 hours and 24 minutes preparing for and travelling to the in-person event, which is about three times the time involved in either the audio or video meeting. Verizon noted:²

“The price of traveling to meeting after meeting is also paid in the currencies of lost productivity, wasted time, unattended-to work at the office, and time away from home and family – not to mention the stress and frustration involved in travel itself.”

Yet, despite their clear advantages in terms of efficiency, monetary savings, and convenience, audio and video conferences may not provide the same impact that a face-to-face meeting can provide.

Perhaps that’s why 87 percent of those surveyed by Verizon said they most prefer to meet in-person, and in-person meetings were ranked as more productive than their virtual counterparts.³

In-Person Meetings Allow Your Brain to Synchronize with Others

Researchers from Beijing Normal University pointed out that face-to-face communication differs from other forms of communication in two key ways:⁴

•  Face-to-face communication involves the integration of “multimodal sensory information,” such as nonverbal cues (facial expressions, gestures, etc.)
•  Face-to-face communication involves more continuous turn-taking behaviors between partners, which has been shown to play a pivotal role in social interactions and reflects the level of involvement of a person in the communication

These factors are critical to effective communication and may even play a role in helping to synchronize your brain with others in your conversation. In fact, research has shown a significant increase in the neural synchronization between the brains of two partners during face-to-face, but not during other types of, conversation.⁵

According to the study, which was published in The Journal of Neuroscience:⁶

“These results suggest that face-to-face communication, particularly dialog, has special neural features that other types of communication do not have and that the neural synchronization between partners may underlie successful face-to-face communication.”

Interestingly, this neural synchronization is also thought to play a key role in leader emergence, with those emerging as leaders synchronizing their brain activity with followers to a greater degree than occurs between followers and other followers.⁷

The quality of the communication was found to be a more important contributor to neural synchronization than the quantity of communication. This suggests that perhaps even infrequent in-person meetings may have more of an impact than frequent digital meetings.