When your work from home days become a slog, the solution may be to back off instead of doubling down. To overcome fatigue and burnout, add new elements into your typical procedure. For example, offer to help another department, ask to learn a new skill, or take on a special project. Video conferencing companies can also change their tools to reduce Zoom fatigue. The survey also showed that people of colour tended to report higher Zoom fatigue than white people, although the effect is much smaller than the difference accounted for by gender. In these difficult times, we’ve made a number of our coronavirus articles free for all readers.
- A 2021 University of Arizona study found that having your camera on during a virtual meeting is more tiring than having it off.
- With the strategies mentioned above, you can keep a check on your stress levels while making the most of what video calls have to offer.
- The more people you add to a meeting—especially a video call—the more potential distractions you add to the mix.
- This also makes the lighter aspects of conversation, such as humor and comic relief, more difficult.
- You can be summoned for a Zoom call at any time, even on weekends.
- This blurs work-life boundaries, since people are working and using the same communication tool in their home environments, which can make personal video calls feel like an obligation.
Hiding self-view is the best way to avoid looking at and analyzing your every movement or gesture. It’s not necessary for you to see yourself all the time, as it can make you feel self-conscious and lead to self-criticism. Reduce stimuli on the screen by keeping your Zoom window on speaker view and closing all other programs and browser windows. It can also make you less effective in your work, as it affects your ability to focus on the tasks at hand. For example, if someone looks at something off-screen, we don’t know the context and therefore don’t understand why they’re distracted. We must also work harder to understand the body language of our colleagues.
Vary Day-to-Day Tasks
The good news is each one of us can contribute to reducing Zoom fatigue. You can change some simple things to improve everyone’s video meeting experience. In April 2020, PR Pioneer released the results of a survey of 3,500 Americans working from home, which found that many miss their “work spouse” more than they would miss their actual spouse! To be fair, because of the pandemic, these workers were around their spouse 24/7 but had zero in-person time with their closest work colleague.
Zoom fatigue symptoms range from physical ailments such as eye strain and headaches to psychological issues like anxiety. Women, meanwhile, are more likely to experience higher Zoom fatigue than men, according to a 2021 study of 10,591 people. It turns out 14 percent of women reported feeling very to extremely fatigued, compared to 5.5 percent for men, said Fauville, co-author of the study.
Meet and Build Connections
According to the survey, women spent more time per day in meetings, with shorter breaks between them, than men. They also reported greater levels of mirror anxiety and felt more trapped by their video calls—the two strongest predictors of high Zoom fatigue. As the demand to meet virtually grows, several kinds of virtual reality (VR) platforms could help us remote working fatigue adapt technology to our needs. These VR programs can project your avatar into spaces, such as virtual conference rooms. Many companies have since developed different VR social platforms, including Facebook Horizon, VIVE Sync, AltspaceVR, Spatial, and VRChat. The increase in video conferencing occurs against the backdrop of a much more sedentary lifestyle.
- Changing your video conferencing habits can help you combat Zoom fatigue.
- Zoom meetings come with a lot more distractions than in-person meetings.
- Computer and other digital device screens emit blue light, which is processed by the photoreceptors in the back of our eyes and keeps us alert and can create eye fatigue, Feldman said.
- No, you don’t always need to have a moderator, but following a simple agenda can go a long way to helping those in your meeting stay productive and focused on the topic at hand.
- From time to time, working in a new location for one week, one day, or even just a few hours may be enough of a change to bust you out of a rut.
This separates work and play, which can help reduce meeting fatigue. In virtual meetings, however, things like muffled audio, background noise, and transmission delays can ruin the flow of communication. A 2012 German study involving phone calls found that a 1.2-second delay could make a listener rate the speaker as less attentive.
Switch to text-based communications
Try setting strict limits for yourself when it comes to the number of Zoom calls you’re allowed. We recommend only allotting for two or three virtual meetings per day. Going even further, try keeping each of those meetings to under an hour long. Because of that, try switching communication apps, having one dedicated to work meetings and another dedicated to social meetings. For example, maybe your team conducts video conferencing via GoToMeeting but does virtual team building via Zoom.
Challenge yourself to find unique socially distanced ways you can spend time with friends, family, and neighbors, especially outdoors. We tell ourselves that we can easily handle this kind of multitask activity, but science suggests otherwise. To do different kinds of work like this, we have to turn certain parts of our brains on and off — and switching between tasks can reduce our effective productivity by as much as 40 percent. Grace Lau is the Director of Growth Content at Dialpad, an AI-powered cloud communication platform for better and easier team collaboration. She has over 10 years of experience in content writing and strategy.
