For distance workers, online meetings are how they connect with their employers, workers, and clients. In this article we propose some ideas to plan for online meetings and to deal with the resulting burnout.
- Take care of your environment: with a clean and organized workspace, we can avoid visual distractions. Therefore, we recommend clearing your desk and other spaces within your range of vision; in other words, have out only what is necessary.
- Do a test run: this will help you avoid videocall errors, either visual or audial.
- Avoid background noise: establishing a workspace that is free of noise increases concentration and improves communication with whoever is in the meeting.
- Plan the meeting: make an outline with all the points you want to mention during the video call, to avoid leaving out important topics and to see your completed objectives throughout the meeting, which provokes a feeling of satisfaction surrounding your productivity and the work that was done.
- Coordinate schedules: This could be one of the most important points, not only to avoid overlapping meetings but also to make sure there are breaks between meetings so workers can rest, reconnect, and avoid stress.
However, as you may be able to observe, sometimes it is not possible to follow all of these recommendations, producing cases of burnout from video calling. Online meeting fatigue is colloquially known as “Zoom burnout”, which happens especially when one is paying more attention to the surroundings of the other person on the video call than the actual content of the meeting, because a dog walks into the frame, a child starts crying, etc. These are conditions that produce more fatigue than an in-person meeting, since it is more common for these types of distractions to occur..
And as online meetings will continue taking place for those who work remotely, here is a list of applications for holding online meetings:
- Zoom.
- Google Meet.
- Skype.
- Microsoft Teams.
- Webex.
- Go to Meeting.
- Hangout.
- Facetime.