RDEL #39: How can teams resolve video meeting fatigue?

This week we review research on the causes of videoconferencing fatigue, as well as mitigation strategies.

Welcome back to Research-Driven Engineering Leadership. Each week, we pose an interesting topic in engineering leadership, and apply the latest research in the field to drive to an answer.

Video meetings are a core staple of a hybrid or remote working culture, and have exploded in popularity following the COVID-19 pandemic. While necessary, the increased dependency on them has also created fatigue and tension on many teams. This week we explore this by asking: how do teams resolve video meeting fatigue?

The context

Video conferencing tools have long been used in corporate settings, but never as much as when the COVID-19 pandemic forced all non-essential employees to work from home. The increase in video meetings for knowledge workers led to the emergence of a new trend: videoconferencing fatigue.

While companies are now able to take meetings in person, a significantly higher number of companies are now fully remote or hybrid and the use of video meetings has remained high. Teams still report fatigue from video meetings which result from a number of factors: staring at a screen, missing body language, artificially-sized faces, limited mobility, and constant self-view. In this study, we examine what tensions result from videoconferencing fatigue and how teams can resolve it.

The research

Researchers at Microsoft, Stanford University, and universities across the UK collaborated to perform a diary study from 849 employees of a large global technology company. Participants were recruited from almost all regions of the world, but primarily in North America and the UK. A dialectical approach was used to identify and analyze the top points of tension, as well as the top strategies for mitigating videoconferencing fatigue.

The core research questions of the study.

Researchers found that the most common tension described by participants was between the two poles of social encounters - spontaneous/informal vs agenda-bound/formal encounters. These tensions were exacerbated by three factors: technical issues and use, the framing of all encounters as meetings, and a lack of models for remote social encounters.

For resolving videoconferencing tension, researchers identified the top three strategies employed by employees to mitigate fatigue and the varying degrees of success:

1. Pole switching between social encounters, either within meetings, in different meetings, or in different relationships.

   1. Top issues with this were the inability to have “side conversations” in video calls and derailment of agenda-bound meetings with no clear agenda.

   2. Social “drop in meetings” were frequently used, but a limited number of participants found them to be successful

2. Choosing one pole over another

   1. Many teammates described focusing only on agenda-bound, work focused encounters. While this improved people’s duration of time spent on videoconferencing tools, teammates reported a loss of coworker relationships and higher rates of isolation and disengagement.

3. Bringing the poles together

   1. The rarest mitigation strategy included managing personal discussions within a work-focused meeting to keep a balance between social and task-related encounters. This was rarely implemented and more often described as a desired outcome rather than an implemented one.

The application

Without intervention, the tensions described above will create a more stark divide when some teammates are in the office and others are not, impacting overall workplace engagement and collaboration. Drawing on the relative success of the studied mitigation strategies, here are a few ways to resolve video fatigue:

1. Think beyond meetings and build a new dynamic collaboration concept

   1. Defining all virtual communication as a type of “meeting” creates a risk of overuse and contributes to meeting fatigue. It also impacts the team’s ability to create structure when meetings can be task-oriented or social. By moving beyond the concept of a “meeting” and redefining the different forms of collaboration, teams can create better structures for the variety of virtual engagements. When virtual conversations start to feel different from one another, they reduce the risk of videoconferencing fatigue.

2. Know when formats can be virtual, and when they should not be.

   1. Since teams have been able to continue in-person gatherings, it has become clear that virtual substitutes don’t always meet the bar for in-person interactions. While still a useful tool to bring distanced teammates together, virtual social events should be supplemented with in-person opportunities to reduce fatigue and create more richness in the team’s social engagements. There are different strategies for creating those in-person opportunities (for example: quarterly retreats, or lunches with geolocated teammates), and different teams will have different preferences. By acknowledging the limitations of virtual social engagements and building in-person culture around it, teams can mitigate the risk of videoconferencing fatigue.

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Have a great week and Happy Research Monday!

Lizzie

From the Quotient team