Written By: Victoria Ruth Manuela
Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world in late 2019, millions of companies have been forced to operate their businesses in a remote work setting or else known as the term “work from home”. One of the most popular solutions that companies choose to adapt with the new working environment is to replace face-to-face meetings with video conferencing tools. For instance, Zoom, a video conferencing application, experienced a rapid increase of users from roughly 10 million daily participants in December 2019 and jumped to 300 million daily participants in April 2020.
This practice is highly chosen because of the similarities between face-to-face meetings and video conference meetings, where managers and employees can see each other’s faces and discuss orally . But it turns out the seemingly fitting substitute to face-to-face meeting isn’t the most appropriate at a remote work cycle as there is also a rising phenomenon in video conference users commonly known as “Zoom fatigue”. Zoom fatigue refers to the feeling of exhaustion both mentally and physically caused by constant video conferencing.
According to a study by Jeremy Bailenson (2021), a Stanford researcher, in his journal titled Technology, Mind, and Behavior suggested that the Zoom fatigue phenomenon is caused by several factors, including excessive amount of close-up contemplation, higher cognitive load, individuals overly staring at themselves causing a distraction due to self flaw objectification, and lack of physical mobilization. Even worse when companies plan to have several daily video conference meetings as a way to monitor their employees.
It’s a common mismanagement practice for companies to hold multiple back-to-back video conferences in a day to maximize productivity. When in fact this practice only increases tiredness and fatigue among employees and further lowers the productivity rate because tasks keep getting pushed and bottlenecked due to employees being fully focused on the video conferences and neglecting their actual work.
It is apparent that like any other managerial problems, Zoom fatigue also has negative side effects on the business itself. With the lack of energy to perform well on the job, Zoom fatigue undoubtedly suppresses employee satisfaction, engagement, and even creativity. Resulting in a decrease in job productivity.
Managing businesses in a work from home environment should be handled with a digital mindset. Transforming one’s way of working into digital is a process needed to be analyzed and updated constantly.
To tackle this issue, there are several considerations and changes that can be made to reduce Zoom fatigue and effectively manage employees in a remote workplace. Such as, cutting down multiple unnecessary video conferencing and instead plan on having a few important meetings and switching from video conference monitoring into a work progress check non video based monitoring. It is also important to limit the amount of time per meeting and schedule breaks between meetings to ensure employees are able to breathe and stay focused during video conferences.
The author is a student at the Brawijaya University, Indonesia.
