Six Tips to Reduce Zoom Fatigue

If you’ve started to feel virtual fatigue, you’re not alone. The world’s most popular video conferencing platform, Zoom, saw an increase of 10 million users a month in February 2020 to over 300 million users by April 2020. (Right now, I wish I had bought stock in Zoom. Anyone else feel this way?) And with this sudden massive increase in usage, we saw a commensurate increase in fatigue. “Zoom fatigue” became a popular term to describe what people were facing. (Of course, it’s worth considering perhaps part of Zoom fatigue is that we’re a year into a pandemic, and the fatigue we might feel from that could be conflated.) 

In his article Nonverbal Overload: A Theoretical Argument for the Causes of Zoom Fatigue, author and researcher Jeremy N. Bailenson posits that there are four main reasons why people feel so drained after spending all day in virtual meetings. They are eye gaze at a close distance, cognitive load, an all-day mirror, and reduced mobility. Let’s dig into each of them.

Eye Gaze At a Close Distance

Consider the space around you when you are talking. In Western culture, we feel pretty comfortable when strangers are several feet away – the distance of our outstretched hand being able to reach their outstretched hand. With our intimate relationships, we get close enough for a hug or a kiss. In our Zoom meetings, all our colleagues suddenly appear as close as our loved ones. Suddenly Alex from accounting is as close as my spouse and kids, and I’m not really sure I love Alex from accounting that much. 

Cognitive Load

Since so much communication is non-verbal, when we are on a Zoom a lot of that information is lost to us. We can’t see if a person is fidgety because they are bored, or tell as easily if they want to interject and add a point, or are shifting uncomfortably because they don’t understand. Even the few-millisecond lag time between the video image of someone speaking and their words can be cognitively draining as your brain sorts out the discrepancy. 

It can also be distracting to deal with all the cute virtual backgrounds – one person is sitting on a tropical beach, one person is outside the Eiffel Tower on a fall day, one person is in a gilded cottage with a roaring fireplace in the background. Also, people sometimes forget to mute – and you get to hear all their household background noise, the dings and alerts coming through their computer when a message arrives, and their own career-limiting musings about “how long is this VP going to drone on?” (Those comments might add some levity for the co-workers who dislike this person’s continued employment.)

Absolute silence is the opposite problem. You get worried that they aren’t listening, they have lost the signal, the connection is down, you’ve done something wrong and accidentally muted yourself or even logged off. 

An All-Day Mirror

Imagine in the physical workplace, for the entirety of an 8-hr workday, an assistant followed you around with a handheld mirror, and for every single task you did and every conversation you had, they made sure you could see your own face in that mirror. This sounds ridiculous, but in essence, this is what happens on Zoom calls. All-day long, there is a big mirror in your face, highlighting all your perceived flaws. 

And most people when watching a Zoom don’t stare directly into the camera, which would allow them to seem to be making direct eye contact – it appears that they are staring slightly off to the side because they are looking down at the faces on the screen. And, guess whose face most people are looking at most of the time? You guessed it – themselves. 

 Environment-Conscious

 At work, you can get yourself all gussied-up and looking sharp. Zoom call at home? Now everyone in your office is staring at your dirty laundry – both real and proverbial. 

Also, there can a real blurring of the lines between different parts of your life. The same room you are zooming out of might also be where you now talk to your boss, say hi to your friends and toast a glass of wine, chat with your children’s teacher about their math, and have your date night dinner.

Finally, you’re also conscious of the environment that your audience is in: you are peering into their lives, their home office set-up, and the act looking into each of their lives and seeing their world as disrupted and disjointed as our is a reminder that all of us are going through this upside-down funhouse mirror experience of the pandemic, where there isn’t any boundary between home and work.

Reduced Mobility

Your camera has a field of view. When you are on a Zoom, you are constrained to stay seated within that field of view. This can make you feel trapped in a way, and limited on what you can do. As well, it’s fatiguing to be sitting all day. If you’ve ever been on a twelve-hour flight, you know what I’m talking about. You crave standing up, stretching, and walking around. Staying in a frozen, sedentary position is energy-depleting. Additionally, it can prove to be harmful overall for your posture. Finally, when you’re on Zoom, you have to stay close to the keyboard in case you need to type an answer or hit the unmute button.

Solutions to Zoom Fatigue

1.      Turn Off Your Camera

 The obvious solution to feeling self-conscious is removing yourself from view. If it makes sense, this is something that should be encouraged by the speaker – for example, if the speaker is sharing their screen and presenting a slide deck, everyone should just have their cameras off. It gives you the comfort that you can stretch, stand up, get up from your chair and walk back. However, if the meeting is collaborative and people are exchanging ideas, it would be unnerving for the speaker to be staring into space. There are times when it makes sense to have everyone’s camera on. But if you don’t need to, then encourage everyone to take a break from it and treat the meeting exactly as you would a teleconference in days gone by.

2.     Have Your Own Space (If Possible)

I have a personal office in our home. When the pandemic hit, it was no problem for me to close the door and deliver presentations without distraction. My wife was an entirely different story. Her role demanded privacy because of the nature of the conversations she had. Shortly into the pandemic, an Ikea desk was purchased, a corner of the master bedroom reorganized, and this became my wife’s new permanent home-office space.           

3.     Opt for Non-Zoom Communication

An anonymous office worker said, “I just survived another Zoom meeting that could have been an email.”  Because it’s so easy to jump on a Zoom call, people might start deferring to it automatically. But you don’t need to do a Zoom in every circumstance. The phone has worked great for generations, helping people maintain relationships and build business empires. One of the smartest things we can do right now is to say “no” to a Zoom when a phone call would do. Or, at the very least, gently suggest that you switch formats and see if the other person is amenable to doing so. A phone call lets us get up and walk around, multitask if that’s appropriate, physically move around, and it lets your eyes have a rest. 

4.     Give Your Eyes a Break

When someone spends the day staring at a screen, their eyes become fatigued from the constant stare, and they become irritated as we hold our eyes open longer. The solution to this is the 20-20-20 method, which suggests that every 20 minutes you should look away from your screen and focus instead on something that is 20 feet away, for 20 seconds. On top of that, just give your eyes a rest and close them completely for 20 seconds! A final tip: try getting in the habit that every time you click on a link, you blink. It’s a little behavioural reminder to give your eyes a break.

5.     Making Sure Everyone is Speaking Up

Another problem that participants in Zoom meetings face is that it can be harder to get a word in edgewise. In a live meeting, you can raise your hand to interject. In a virtual meeting, a digital raised hand can more easily be missed or even go ignored by the host. This can leave employees feeling disengaged rather than being active, valued participants in the meeting. The solution is to for the meeting host to ensure that everyone gets a chance to be heard. In his book Smarter Faster Better, author Charles Duhigg shares this exact strategy as gleaned by an internal study at Google. They found that managers that promoted psychological safety in meetings seemed to have higher-performing and more cohesive teams. The trick? Make sure everyone in the team had a moment to share their thoughts. Smart managers would keep a list of all meeting participants and put a tick next to each name as the meeting progressed. This may not be as practical with large audiences, but the principle is still good: where reasonable, make sure people are involved and speaking up.

6.     Stand Up and Stretch

The most repetitive strain injury prior to the pandemic wasn’t carpal tunnel – it was sitting. Since we get swept up in the business of our day and often neglect self-care, try making it a part of your meeting kick-offs, or have a half-time 30-second stretch, and just watch people perk right up.

The prevalence and ease-of-use of virtual meetings have allowed the incalculable benefit of allowing us to stay connected with clients, colleagues, and loved ones while maintaining safe habits through social distancing. By incorporating these strategies outlined here, you can reduce your virtual fatigue and take away one of the stressors the pandemic has added to our day.

CJ Calvert is a corporate speaker and author of Bouncing Back Through COVID-19: Overcoming Burnout A Year Into the Pandemic. Visit www.cjcalvert.com