Zoom fatigue

When Covid struck, like millions around the world I switched to a life of working from home.  I’d already been working from home a fair bit but for many it was a rapid adjustment which forced big changes on personal energy levels.  On the upside – no commute and few regrets there.   But it also meant a big change in making personal contact and connections and a lot more screen time.

You’d think that removing our commute time would mean we’d feel more energised and refreshed from getting back all that time, yet evidence shows people are feeling the fatigue of screen time.

As leaders our teams and our organisations depend on us maintaining strong energy levels throughout the day.  As the working day ends, those we hold dear, including ourselves rely on there being sufficient energy left over from work to be great parents, friends, partners and to look after ourselves.  

In this week’s article we’re looking at why are we still feeling zoomed out at the end of the day and what simple steps can we take to improve our energy levels.

For many people Covid marked the start of home-working that continues to this day.  Gone were the lengthy commutes and perhaps agonised moments of thinking how to dress in the morning.  But also gone were informal moments with colleagues which tech companies quickly tried to emulate through video conferencing.  In 2020 Uk bandwidth consumption doubled in just one year as we all switched to streaming and video calls for work and with family.  We couldn’t be there in person but with Teams, GMeet, Zoom, Portals, Facebtime we could try and replicate some of the experience.

So how come we were spending fewer overall hours at work yet finding those hours somewhat more draining than they were before?  

Reason number 1 is that work’s normal cycle of brain intensive activity shifted a gear.  Normally within your typical office day your commute, much though you may detest it creates a period of decompression for your brain – whether you listen to music, a podcast or just zone out, your brain is less taxed and working at a different pace to being at work.

And even when you’re in the office most people’s days have a natural variety to them.  Shifting positions or crossing a building to get to the next meeting, the social contact before and after meetings, impromptu conversations at the water cooler or whatever is in your office are all periods of decompression.

Video conferencing has saved us significant amounts of time “wasted” in travel and social niceties.  It’s also concentrated work into a series of similar activities that are repeated often over and over in the same day which is utilising the same parts of your brain in repetitive sequence without a break.

In a June 2021 survey by Tork, nearly a quarter of people working from home feel guilty or judged for taking a break.  Despite being significantly nearer to their own choice of kitchen or dining room, two thirds of people lunch at their home-desk and if you’re a woman it gets worse as you’re twice as likely as a man not to take a break  and even if you do, you’re more likely to spend it doing household chores instead.

The rest of the time we’re often in front of a screen and more often than not, it’s on a video call of some kind.   Cognitive load is the impact of a task or series of task on brain function.  We don’t have unlimited load capacity so when certain tasks create an excessive load, we see the impact elsewhere in productivity.   Video calls have an on average greater cognitive load effect than attending a conventional meeting.

How can this be?   Researchers at the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab[1] studied the loading impact on our brains through attending meetings via virtual platforms such as Zoom or Teams and have some interesting explanations why you appear to feel so exhausted after a day full of video calls.

1.      Look me in the eyes.   In a physical meeting, we tend to focus on the face of the speaker and maybe occasionally scan the wider room.  In a virtual meeting we are presented with all the faces at once.  Our brains are geared to recognise faces and detect emotions and so rather than doing this in a controlled manner, part of our brain function on a virtual meeting is working hard to scan and read all the faces presented, continuously and on top of substantive content in the meeting.

2.      Getting up close and personal.   Our brains are geared to behave differently depending on how close up a face is presented – when a face comes up close towards us and becomes bigger than we perceive ours to be, it triggers our brain to see this as an intense situation normally associated for example with conflict and danger.   Our brains become hyper-aroused and do this all day and the brain is extending substantial effort rationalising and compensating for the additional stimulus.

3.      The mirror image.   Imagine if you walked into a conventional meeting room and it had been decorated with wall-to-wall mirrors.  You’d likely feel a bit unsettled and very self-conscious.   In video calls we’re treated to a mirror image of ourselves all the time and somewhat worse, when we speak, the tech obliged by holding up a super-sized mirror.   Whilst figuring out what we want to say and how we’ll say it, part of our brain is simultaneously assessing how we look against our own insecurities of personal appearance, did we brush our hair, apply make-up, how we look compared to everyone else.   Seeing ourselves in mirrors typically generates negative emotions the brain needs to compensate for.   When we use video calls, we force our brains into working hard to compensate.

4.      Stand still so I can see you.  Since most laptop cameras have a fixed point of view, it follows that in a video meeting we have to stay very still for very long periods of time otherwise we disappear from view and that makes us look like we’re no longer connecting.   In a conventional meeting, you may shift position or a skilled facilitator will arrange the meeting so you get to stand, hold the pen, do a physical exercise with others in the room.   In video meetings we have whiteboards for sure, but this does not invoke a change in physical behaviour, we remain sitting still holding our head upright and facing the screen.   Over time, this creates tension and fatigue on specific muscles.

So we have a lot to thank video technology for, for reducing our commute and perhaps helping reduce our carbon footprint and maybe giving us back some time to spend on things that are important.  But the time savings don’t improve our productivity if the things replacing it are creating a higher cognitive load than we can cope with.

We have adopted the technology rather than adapted the technology to suit our physiology.  And this is why we have the paradox of sometimes working shorter hours, but after a day of video calls, feeling far more exhausted.

Want to improve your productivity through gaining an energy boost.  Here’s some tricks to try.

-        Reduce the size of your video calling app.   Especially if you use a big monitor, reduce the window size and the images of individual speakers, this will reduce the effort your brain will naturally attempt to expend in analysing every thumbnail image of every person on the call.   Some apps allow you to change the viewpoint so only the latest three speakers are shown.  Try it and you should find it a lot less exhausting.

-        Stop looking in the mirror.    Within your video conferencing app there will be an option to stop self-image view or words to that effect.   Unless it is really critical in your role to behave as a TV presenter, try cutting out this view of yourself – others can still see you so this is not quite as abrupt as cutting the camera altogether but your brain will then stop spending energy analysing your appearance and hand back those resources to be a great participant in your meeting.

-        Build in breaks to move.   You may need agreement with others on your calls to make this happen but it’s time we demand the same etiquette of video meetings that we’d expect in a face to face setting and that means if you are the chair of a meeting, consider how to give people breaks from sitting in a fixed location all through the meeting.   That might mean agreeing certain parts of the agenda are “cameras off” and finding ways people can upload creative input e.g. using an app such as mentimeter rather than the in-built whiteboard functions that keep people locked into one physical position.

If you ever had to face the choice between more hours and more effective, I’m sure you’ll go for more effective.   So give your brain a pat on the back for its already awesome athletic capability, treat it well and help it serve you with peak performance just when you need it most.

[1] Four causes for ‘Zoom fatigue’ and their solutions | Stanford News