Avoid Zoom Fatigue. Zoom Tips for Technophobes
By: Kathy Annandale
Tags: Zoom, Strategy, Business, Meetings, Advice

Tips for Jazzing Up Your Zoom Meetings

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

Yes it’s happening again, we’re into our second lockdown here in Wales, UK and Zoom fatigue is fast turning into Zoom exhaustion.

At first we thought this would all blow over soon and that this was just an interim measure but now that the reality is dawning on us that we’re in this not just for the long haul while we await inoculations, but let’s admit it, FOREVER because, can any of you now be bothered to travel for most of your meetings now that it’s been proved we don’t need to?

There’s no going back to how things were. So what is zoom fatigue and what can we do about it?

According to Dr Lee, Assistant Professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California at Los Angeles, “Zoom fatigue describes the tiredness, worry, or burnout associated with overusing virtual platforms of communication. Like other experiences associated with the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, Zoom fatigue is widely prevalent, intense, and completely new.”

It is thought that the fatigue is attributable to the following factors:

We miss the dopamine hit we usually associate our devices and live meetings with. We always seek to maximise reward for our efforts in even the tiniest tasks. It’s what we call the rewards-costs trade off. Our in person face-to-face interactions have been shown on MRI scans to increase activity in the areas of the brain associated with reward as does direct eye contact which improves social bonding, memorisation of faces, like-ability and attractiveness. On zoom you have to focus on looking into the camera to appear as if you are making eye to contact and it’s not always possible to see who trying to look at whom. Additionally we also associate checking our devices for information, however low the value of that information, with a dopamine hit. So we are denied the dopamine reaction or oxytocin reward on two ways which leads to a tiring frustration… Audio delay causes distrust and more work. Video meetings are draining subconsciously because the millisecond delay in virtual verbal responses negatively affect our interpersonal perceptions. It turns out the intricacies of our social interactions are more fragile than we thought. Delays in communication are commonly associated with distrust. Combine this with a marked increase in pandemic inspired stressors such as financial worries, unemployment, school shutdowns, racial injustices, political divisions, physical distancing, and loneliness, then every time we sit down to join a zoom meeting, the mere act of trying to communicate through a device is trigger that reminds us of all our current challenges, an activity that definitely does not reward us. Multitasking threatens our attentional capacity. Let’s be honest, how many times have you started tapping on a device cunningly placed to one side of our laptop. I must admit to being one of the worst offenders if there are a lot of participants in the meeting, compelled to check if something on my phone is more interesting or to check the veracity of the speaker’s claims, something we wouldn’t normally do face to face. The dopamine hit associated with interacting with our usual device serves to highlight the zoom meeting as an unrewarding distraction. The cost of cognitive effort: we normally acquire much of the information we need about how an interpersonal interaction is going from unconscious and non-verbal cues such as posture, subtle facial expressions and touch and we adapt our behaviour in response. Without access to these most used cues, we are forced to employ other less efficient cognitive tools and basically work harder emotionally. I would add to this list the stress of being judged on your background. We all sit and watch the news in complete disbelief that yet another politician has put absolutely no thought into the positioning of their laptop and how it looks when they are lecturing us on austerity from their holiday home or distressingly the opposite, sat huddled in a freezing lean-to kitchen with cracked walls, spiders’ webs and a shadeless light bulb swinging behind them like in a horror movie, or sat in front of piles of debris stacked up haphazardly in a hoarder’s paradise.

We haven’t all got amazing bookshelves to curate our message. I get stressed about how it looks to see bedroom cabinets behind me because it’s easier to zoom from there, quieter and I’m not getting in the way of other people and their activities or having to worry about unaware naked butts jostling past.

So I’ve come up with some solutions: