How do you decide whether to host a meeting in-person or virtually? Cost and travel are considerations that can be easily quantified, but will your team be as effective virtually? Can we train people remotely just as efficiently as we could in-person?

SCOTTIE is investigating collaboration effectiveness, i.e. the ability for participants to communicate effectively and achieve their collaboration objectives within a situational context. By creating and validating a set of metrics, we can use results to quantify differences associated with communication media (e.g. Face-to-Face vs. VideoConferencing vs. Virtual Reality). SCOTTIE’s Travel Substitute Threshold (TST) is an empirically informed model that articulates when in-person is more appropriate, and virtual can replace or even exceed performance in Face-to-Face meetings.

SCOTTIE’s findings can help you make business travel decisions based on your team’s specific situation and communication needs. It also identifies opportunities for remote collaboration software to be optimized for communication goals to increase remote team effectiveness.

Systematic Communication Objectives and Telecommunications Technology Investigations and Evaluations (SCOTTIE) is jointly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy ARPA-E, Raytheon Technologies Research Center, and Iowa State University.