Four months into the pandemic here in the US means four months since much of the workforce has gone from zero to hero on Zoom or some equivalent video software.  Pre-pandemic, only 5% of the workforce used video conferencing regularly for meetings; now, it’s everybody.

How’s it working out for most employees?  In a word, dismally.  Most people report Zoom fatigue, high levels of stress and loneliness, and low levels of job satisfaction.  It brings me no satisfaction at all to note that it’s what I predicted in Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World in 2018.

Why is there so little joy in Zoomland?  Complaints about the workplace and the commute have been around as long as workplaces and commutes, so why aren’t more people happy to forgo getting there and work from home?  Three reasons primarily.  First of all, there’s the stress of the pandemic itself.  The fear of death and the indeterminacy of the sentence hang over us all . Second, there’s the stress of having to play the multiple roles simultaneously that we used to play seriatim:  worker, maybe executive, wife/husband/significant other, mother/father, caregiver, and so on down the list.  Third, of course we miss our fellow humans.

Finally, there’s the difficulty of using the software effectively itself.  That’s what I’m going to focus on here.  Video conferencing is hard for several reasons.  We humans take 8 or 9 years to learn how to converse effectively as children – we learn the whole retinue of eye contact, hand gesture, head moves, nods, smiles, frowns, body moves, and so on that help regulate conversation.  When you reduce human faces and bodies to two (smaller) dimensions, it gets harder to read all those gestures.  So we interrupt more often, and that’s annoying for all.

Next, there’s the slight delay between the video signal and the audio signal.  The research suggests that we’re not consciously aware of the lag, but unconsciously we read it as the other person’s incompetence because he or she is moving lips but no sound is coming out.  So we’re annoyed and disdainful.  Imagine how that feels after a day’s worth of work.

But that’s not all.  The third big contributor to Zoom displacement is that our sixth sense, proprioception (that’s how your unconscious mind keeps track of where you are in space and where the other people in the room are in space), is thrown off by the two-dimensionality of the screen.  Your unconscious mind can’t tell where those other people are.  They look close, because the screen is close, but they look too small because the screen makes them too small for their apparent distance.  The result is proprioception confusion, to which your brain responds by sending out stress signals.

So we’re annoyed, disdainful, and in fight-flight-freeze mode.  That’s a recipe for Zoom fatigue and dissatisfaction in general.  How can we make it better?  How can we put the joy back into virtual presentations and meetings?

1. Keep them short.  The simplest way to reduce your stress is to avoid hour-long, back-to-back meetings.  Just because you are at home with few options for going out doesn’t mean that you have to fill the time with endless Zoom get togethers.  Try experimenting with 10-minute sessions, or 20-minute sessions.  And put breaks in between the meetings, with enough time for you to stretch, breathe, have a cup of tea, meditate, go for a walk – whatever calms you enough to get back into it in an hour or so.

2. Put in (positive) emotions. Zoom strips out the emotions that naturally get expressed among humans, so put them back in.  Whatever you need to do to amp up your perceived emotional score, do it.  Wave your hands around, speak passionately, laugh loudly, and so on. 

3. Take care of the humans on the call. Build in some check-in time and make a point of putting in the water-cooler conversations that would have happened naturally in the office.  It’s better, by the way, to make those check ins in the middle or toward the end of the call, rather than at the beginning when people are struggling to find their mute buttons or fix the video or having difficulty signing on.
4. Add some play. A surprising amount of office time is spent in chit-chat, running jokes, and gossip.  Naturally we should all spend all of our time doing good and fighting crime, but on Zoom don’t be afraid to throw in a trivia contest, or an ugly sweater contest, or anything that feels like fun and games, if only for a few moments.  

5. Switch to the phone. Finally, if the video call is with a regular team and you don’t need to show anything immediately on the screen, try the old-fashioned phone conference.  Sure you’ll lose a little in facial cues, but you’ll gain in relaxation and energy from the team.  Try meeting for a few minutes with everyone on video, then moving to audio only (for all) for the duration of the meeting. You’ll be surprised at how easily you can work together.

Try these simple fixes to put a little of the joy back into Zoomland, and let’s all hope the pandemic is controlled soon and we can go back to moving more freely around.