Video helps remote work: speakers who need to negotiate common ground benefit from seeing each other

More and more organizations are forming teams that are notco-located. These teams communicate via email, fax, telephone andaudio conferences, and sometimes video. The question often ariseswhether the cost of video is worth it. Previous research has shownthat video makes people more satisfied with the work, but it doesnthelp the quality of the work itself. There is one exception;negotiation tasks are measurably better with video. In this study,we show that the same effect holds for a more subtle form ofnegotiation, when people have to negotiate meaning in aconversation. We compared the performance and communication ofpeople explaining a map route to each other. Half the pairs havevideo and audio connections, half only audio. Half of the pairswere native speakers of English; the other half were non-nativespeakers, those presumably who have to negotiate meaning more. Theresults showed that non-native speaker pairs did benefit from thevideo; native speakers did not. Detailed analysis of theconversational strategies showed that with video, the non-nativespeaker pairs spent proportionately more effort negotiating commonground.