‘Zoom fatigue’ has hit 4 in 10 employees — your best course of action

It may not shock you that 38% of people say they’ve hit their limits as far as virtual meetings go. Zoom fatigue is real, confirms a recent Robert Half survey.

The novelty of seeing their co-workers on a computer screen has worn off, some 10 months into the coronavirus pandemic.

Beware the biggest pet peeves

And while you can’t pull the plug (literally) anytime soon, you can try to steer clear of employees’ biggest pet peeves that aggravate the situation:

• dealing with technical issues (28%)
• too many meeting participants (19%), and
• people talking over each other (19%).

Follow Facebook’s lead to combat Zoom fatigue

Some of your peers are having luck re-energizing their teams.

Facebook recently noticed that its employees – and managers – started to suffer from video fatigue. Many lost interest and made excuses to skip meetings.

Sameer Chowdhri, Global Head, Workplace for HR, shared how they tackled this problem. To help employees avoid burnout, they started encouraging a couple of different approaches to meetings:

• For smaller meetings, they told people to make audio calls and try to walk around while they talked.
• For larger meetings, they asked leaders to set up shorter meetings or find different ways to cover the meeting. Perhaps an email or exchange over an app channel would do.

This has helped the whole company stay engaged and productive in meetings.