4 Causes for Virtual Meetings Fatigue and Their Solutions

New research explains why virtual meetings are mentally and physically taxing and how to protect yourself from these effects.

Following the recent widespread use of virtual meetings, communications professor Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, examined the psychological consequences of spending hours per day on these platforms. Just as the term "Googling" is now used to refer to any Internet search, the term "Zooming" is already everywhere, replacing participation in videoconferences, as reliance on virtual meetings has increased dramatically, with hundreds of millions of them happening daily as social distancing protocols have kept people physically apart.

In the first peer-reviewed article that systematically deconstructs Zoom fatigue from a psychological perspective, published in the journal Technology, Mind, and Behavior, Bailenson has analyzed it on the Zoom platform and evaluated it on its technical and individual aspects. He has identified four consequences of long video chats that he says contribute to the feeling known as "virtual meeting fatigue."

Bailenson emphasized that his goal was not to defame any particular virtual meeting platform; he appreciates and uses tools such as the Zoom platform regularly, but to highlight how current applications of our virtual meeting techniques are exhausting and to suggest interface changes, many of which are easy to implement. Moreover, he provides suggestions for users and companies on how to invest in current features in virtual meeting applications to reduce stress.

"Virtual meetings are a useful way to communicate remotely, but just think about the medium; just because you can use the video doesn't mean you have to do it, " Bailenson said.

Here are four main reasons why implementing virtual meetings is cumbersome, according to the study.

4 Reasons for the Stress of Virtual Meetings

1. Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact

The amount of eye contact that occurs during video chats as well as the size of faces on screens are not normal. In a normal meeting, people alternate between looking at the speaker, taking notes, and looking around, but they look at each other's faces all the time during video calls. The listener receives the same non-verbal treatment as the speaker, so even if you don't speak at all during the meeting, you still look at faces staring at you. That is, the amount of visual contact is much greater. "Social anxiety about speaking in front of the public is one of the most common phobias among people today. Standing in front of a crowd staring at you puts you under a huge amount of pressure," Bailenson said.

Another source of stress is that depending on the size of your screen and whether you're using an external monitor, faces may appear in video calls so large as to be uncomfortable. "Generally speaking, for most video calls, if the conversation is one-on-one with a co-worker or even a stranger, you look at the size of a face that mimics the personal space that a person actually occupies," Bailenson said.

When a person's face is so close to our face in real life, our brains interpret the situation as either leading to friendship or conflict, "what happens is that when you use the Zoom platform for several hours, you're in a state of extreme emotion." Bailenson said.

Solution

Until the platforms change their interface, Bailenson recommends disabling the full-screen option and reducing the size of the Zoom window relative to the screen size to reduce the size of the face, and by using an external keyboard to allow more personal space between you and the screen.

2. Seeing yourself all the time during video chats

Most video call platforms display a box showing what you look like on camera during a chat, but it's not normal, “if someone was holding a mirror and constantly following you while you were talking to people, making decisions, giving and receiving feedback in the real world, it would be crazy, no one would ever think of that,” Bailenson said.

Bailenson cited studies that show you are more critical of yourself when you see a reflection of yourself, many of us now see ourselves during video chats for several hours a day, "That is exhausting and debilitating, there is a lot of research showing that there are negative emotional consequences of seeing yourself in the mirror."

Solution

Bailenson advises that platforms change the default practice of showing the video to both the person using the platform and others they are speaking with when others only need to see him. In the meantime, therefore, users must enable the "hide self-view" feature, which they can access by right-clicking on their image.

3. Staying in a specific position for a long time:

Personal conversations and audio phone calls allow humans to walk and move around, but in the case of video calls, the field of view of most cameras is limited, which means that you have to stay in the same place during them, so the movement is abnormally limited. "There's growing research now that says that a person's cognitive performance is better when he moves," Bailenson said.

Solution

Bailenson advises that people care more about the room where they hold virtual meetings and where the camera is located and consider whether they can use things like an external keyboard to leave a distance between them and the screen or to increase flexibility. For example, an external camera placed off the screen will allow you to move your hands and draw on a piece paper during virtual meetings just as we do during real meetings and, of course, it's a good idea to set a rule that allows the camera to be turned off periodically during group virtual meetings as a short non-verbal break.

4. The hardship of body language expression

Bailenson states that nonverbal communication is normal during normal face-to-face interactions, and each of us naturally sends, receives, and interprets nonverbal gestures and signals without thinking, but during video chats, we have to work harder to send and receive those signals.

That is, we have transformed one of the world's most natural acts, personal conversations, into one that requires a lot of thought. "You have to make sure your face is in the middle of the video image, and if you want to show someone you agree with him, you have to nod exaggeratedly or raise your thumb, which adds cognitive load because you're using up mental calories to communicate," Bailenson said.

Gestures can also have different meanings within the context of video conferencing. For example, looking out of the corner of your eye at someone next to you during an in-person meeting means something completely different than someone looking off-screen during a video meeting at their child who has just walked into the room.

Solution

Take an 'audio-only' break during long meetings, Bailenson said: "Not only does this mean turning off the camera to take a break to have put in the extra effort of nonverbal communication, but also turning your eyes away from the screen so you can take a few minutes off from receiving gestures, which sounds realistic, but has no social meaning."

Fatigue and Stress of Virtual Meetings

Many organizations, including schools, large corporations, and government agencies, have reached out to communications researchers at Stanford University to better understand how they can identify best practices in their virtual meetings and come up with organizational guidance, Bailenson and his colleagues responded by devising the Zoom Exhaustion & Fatigue Scale to help measure how much fatigue employees experience in the workplace due to virtual meetings.

The scale, detailed in a recent, yet-to-be peer-reviewed, a paper published by SSRN, advances the search for how to measure stress from personal technology. The reason is a freely available 15-question questionnaire tested by five separate studies over the past year involving more than 500 people. It asks questions about a person's general fatigue, physical, social, emotional, and motivational fatigue. Some sample questions include:

• How exhausted do you feel after video meetings?
• How painful are your eyes after video meetings?
• To what extent do you tend to avoid social attitudes after video meetings?
• How emotionally drained do you feel after video meetings?
• How often do you feel so tired that you can't do anything else after video meetings?

Hancock said the results of the scale could help change technology to reduce stress. It is reported that humans have gone through this experience before. He said: “When we first invented the elevators, we didn’t know whether we should look at each other when we were in them, and recently car sharing raised questions about whether we should talk to the driver or not, or whether we should sit in the back seat, or the front seat next to him, in those cases we have developed new methods to deal with the new situation, and we are going through the same experience with video meetings, and understanding the mechanisms helps us understand the best way to conduct them for different circumstances, different organizations and different types of meetings.”

“We hope our work can help uncover the causes of this problem and help people modify their video-conferencing practices to reduce the stress of virtual meetings, and may also help designers of video meeting platforms challenge and rethink some of the paradigms that underpin video meetings."