What’s Meeting Fatigue?
We believe many of you have heard of Zoom Fatigue after the outbreak of Covid-19. During 2020, many employees need to work from home. Enterprises feature video conferencing software such as Zoom to collaborate. However, some people started to have feelings of exhaustion, anxiety or depression after too many video conference calls. Stanford researchers has identified four causes for Zoom Fatigue:
- Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact is highly intense
- Seeing yourself during video chats constantly in real-time is fatiguing
- Video chats dramatically reduce our usual mobility
- The cognitive load is much higher in video chats
The meeting is usually time for team to brainstorm. When there are many people discussing, our brain will need to process much information. We even need to deal with many emotions. If we spend too much time on meetings, it will reduce our energy for sure. During a video conference call, we cannot move and need to stay in front of the camera which easily gets us anxious. When we are under too much stress, it will lead us to burnout, anxiety and depressions. That’s what causes Meeting Fatigue.
Overcome Meeting Fatigue with These 7 Tips
We use meetings to solve problems and discuss projects. We sometimes over rely on meetings which leaves us no time to deal with important things. It’s predictable that excessive meetings exhaust us. However, if you are burning out because of meetings, we need to be faced with the problem. Here are some tips we want to share with you.
1.Decline useless meetings
When your colleague invites you to a meeting, you can check the agenda and ask what you need to do. If you think you don’t need to join or you have other efficient ways to solve the problem, you can decline the meeting. If there’s a timetable on each session, you can choose to join certain sessions and skip the rest.
2.Limit the meeting duration
When there’s a meeting, ask the host to provide the agenda. You not only know what you are going to talk about, but also know the estimated meeting duration. If there are unnecessary items to discuss, you can advise the host to remove them. If you are the host, the agenda can help you plan the ideal meeting duration.
3.Keep your meeting to a manageable size
You have to know if you invite more people to one meeting, it means you take up their working hours. So you need to be choosy about who you invite. If you only want some people to be informed, you can just send them the meeting minutes after the session.
4.Use “Do Not Disturb” on your schedule
It’s impossible to do anything when you are in meetings the whole day. If you like to have meetings in the morning and work in the afternoon, you can set up 2 to 3 hours of “Do Not Disturb” for your daily afternoon schedule. Then you can focus on what you should do and be productive.
5.Take a short break
Taking a break and being productive may sound contradictory. But we are not robots, we cannot be energetic without having enough rest. When you feel tired, you can take a short break or chat with your colleagues to relieve stress.
6.Turn off the camera during the conference call
One of the reasons why people get Zoom Fatigue is because people need to stay in front of the camera, we cannot move our body like in a physical meeting. Therefore, we feel exhausted easily. If it’s not necessary to turn on the camera, you can consider only turning on the audio in the virtual meeting. You will feel much relaxed.
7.Observe and accept your emotion
Sometimes you need to deal with many emotions in the meeting. If we don’t know how to let go of the negative energy, it will affect our work performance. Though you cannot control how others say and think, you can control your emotion. When you find yourself depressed, you can take different perspectives to check your work. You don’t need to bear others’ negative emotions.
What Else We Can Do for Meeting Fatigue?
There are many things that cause our pressure during a meeting, such as the old conference equipment. If you don’t upgrade your equipment, you will take too much time to set up meetings.You may even get disconnected easily. To relieve your stress, you can consider adopting ASTROS wireless presentation solutions. It not only increases your meeting efficiency, but also reduces awkward meeting moments. If you are interested in ASTROS, contact our Pro AV experts for more suggestions.
