Remember Zoom fatigue? Perhaps it’s only a distant memory now as you’ve returned from the pandemic to a full in-person schedule. Or perhaps, as I often hear, you have what seems to be a permanently altered work rhythm, which has become some hybrid mix of in-person meetings for the important ones, and Zoom meetings for efficiency and convenience. Well, as we venture forward in this brave new world of hybrid, we have three reasons for being wary of the long-terms effects of this continued experiment with video conferencing on a regular basis.
In my pre-pandemic book, Can You Hear Me?, published in 2018 by Harvard Business Press, I identified a few culprits for Zoom fatigue. First, and most important, is the phenomenon that arises because of our sixth sense, the one few of us are aware of, proprioception. It’s never taught in the schools, as it should be, along with the five well-discussed senses, sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. And yet proprioception is arguably just as important as the other senses, and perhaps more so. It is the unconscious sense that allows us to keep track of ourselves in space, and to keep track of where others are, so we don’t bump into the furniture or other people. If you have a partner that you sleep with, proprioception allows you (and your significant other) to know where each other are, so that you don’t kick each other (at least not much) while you are sleeping.
The trouble for that highly critical sense is that, on Zoom or any video conferencing software, proprioception can’t figure out precisely where you are or where those funny little boxes that appear to contain people are. They seem to be about an arm’s length away, which is very close in personal terms and requires a lot of attention from our unconscious minds, and yet they are too small to be that close. So your proprioception sense goes into alert status, tirelessly asking the question of your unconscious mind, ‘where are those people?’ and getting no good answer. The result is low-level stress, and after a while, fatigue.
The second cause of Zoom fatigue is that video conferencing software delivers video and sound at slightly different moments, about a 3-millisecond lag apart, like a movie where the sound and visual elements are out of sync. Three milliseconds aren’t enough to bring to the attention of your conscious mind, but your unconscious mind notes the lag and – once again – gets tired doing the work of trying to reconcile that slight hiccup in the feed. Also, by the way, you make a judgment that the person you’re interacting with is a little less impressive than if you were meeting them in person. You think there’s something wrong with them, and you downgrade them and the meeting in your mind accordingly.
The third cause of Zoom fatigue I only discovered recently, thanks to research published in Neuroimage, and it’s arguably more dangerous in the long run that the other two. When people communicate with each other in person, their electrical brain rhythms oscillate in synch. We literally get on the same wavelength. Our brains link up, and that’s good for us and good for communication. The study found that when we’re communicating on video software, whether it’s Zoom or Face Time or any similar virtual means, our brains don’t link up with anything like the same effectiveness. The ratio appears to be about ten to one. In other words, for every cross-brain link we manage to establish over video, we get ten times as many in person. From this important standpoint, then, video communication is terribly impoverished compared to in-person meetings.
For all these reasons, then, we need to continue to be wary of relying too much on video communication in ongoing work relationships. All virtual relationships degrade over time, and they need to be re-established by some in-person sessions. Get together for lunch and allow for a lot of cross-brain linking! Monitor all your virtual working relationships and ensure that the important ones are cross-fertilized with in-person psychic recovery opportunities. And allow yourself some rest after a day full of video communications.
This is fascinating Nick. I’ve always suspected there was something impoverished about virtual vs in-person, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it (is that a pun?). I do know that after a day’s in-person training or facilitation, I feel exhausted but on a high. After a long series of video calls I feel exhausted but low, empty, spent. And of course you’ve pointed out many times how we’re having to work harder online to get that sense of connection with the other person. But you’ve given me some of the science behind that, so thank you!
Thanks, Andrew — great to hear from you. Beware of the energy sink that is video conferencing! And give yourself time to recover!
Nick – I agree that in-person meetings are often preferable to virtual ones but not always. For all the benefits of proprioception that you cite, I can’t help recalling the numerous little distractions and inconveniences of the many in-person meetings I’ve experienced over the years. Like the temperature being too cold or too hot, the lighting bad, participants seated too close or too far from each other, bad acoustics, and that annoying colleague sitting next to me eating popcorn, to name just a few. For all its faults, video-conferencing is a blessing that has allowed millions of people to work flexibly from home and to attend meetings that are sometimes more productive and less exhausting than meeting in person. They are also far more economical in many instances, especially for global teams. Sure virtual meetings are far from ideal, but the truth is that they are not going away and neither are in person meetings. The challenge is figuring out in which instances they make the most sense and how to take advantage of the relative benefits while minimizing the negative effect. The same is true for remote versus in-person work.
Tony, of course you’re right about all the perils of in-person meetings. And the good news is that we now have more options than we did before, including the efficient and time-saving (not to mention planet-saving) option of Zoom/Teams/Webex. And we violently agree, I’m sure, on the important work of figuring out what is the optimal mix of in-person v virtual. I recall a mutual friend telling us of a 14-hour flight he took to meet with a (very) important client, pre-Covid, for one hour. Nowadays, that 28 hours of flying can be dispensed with in favor of the single hour on Zoom. Thank heavens! Here’s to the best possible mix of in-person and virtual — and thoughtful, productive meetings however they are held.