However, don't let these funny Zoom fails to discourage you from video-calling your colleagues. "Most creativity is done in face-to-face environments," Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University, told Vox. "It encourages you to be ambitious and motivated. Full-time at home can be pretty miserable. Most people don’t enjoy it, you know, week in week out." 

The expert predicts that, in general, productivity will be down dramatically. "I think even if this all returns to normal, there’s going to be a long-run cost. 2020 is going to be the year of lost innovation. If you look 10 years from now, there’s going to be a hole in new patents and new products and new ideas and great inventions that just didn’t happen in 2020, 2021. Think of scientists or engineers. How can they work properly at home? They’re being sent home, but I suspect they’re really not being very constructive."

According to Bloom, the main thing we all can do to counter this is to recreate social contact, ideally using video conferencing, two ways. "For example, the whole group can meet for a 30-minute video chat at 11:00 every day to catch-up on their personal situation, chat about the news or life in general — no work talk." For individual interactions, Bloom said that managers should aim to spend 10 minutes video-talking individually to each of their employees every morning and every afternoon. "This is time-consuming but critical for keeping employees happy and productive through the next few months."