Zoom Fatigue Is Not Just in Your Head, Study Finds | Hacker News Reader

Zoom Fatigue Is Not Just in Your Head, Study Finds

businessinsider.com

27 pointsmy12parsecs17 comments

I worked remotely for 12 years. Here's how I perceived the experience.

Most of that time I only had to deal with phone + powerpoint conferences. That worked just fine for me.

COVID hit and management decided that not turning on our webcams was wrong in some way. I personally hated it; found it stressful and couldn't see the upside. Meeting in person is a much experience than that.

One on one Zoom meetings were different. There's a clear line of communication and I did't mind seeing the other person. Not that it added much, frankly, but it was fine.

All that said, I didn't feel that zoom vs phone was the main differentiator between a good and a bad environment for remote work (for me, anyway). The key difference was whether most of the decision making was communicated in writing or not. Even something simple like email is easily searchable and leaves a clear record of what was decided and why. Good luck searching a web meeting done three months ago.

Companies would save countless employee hours by making announcements in writing. The idea that the entire staff needs to be online at the same time window to learn what's going on is an extension of "butts in seats" and, from what I can surmise, is purely ego driven.

there are tiers of fidelity when delivering communications. The highest is one on one. The lowest is a short whatsapp.

The lower the fidelity the easier it is for the same message to be misinterpreted.

I don't particularly like sitting in long meetings but I appreciate that more can be communicated the higher the bandwidth of the medium

For me there were two keys

1) a single loudspeaker for the speaker’s voice. For some reason stereo is tiring. Brain can’t locate the speaker in space already and then the voice comes from two different places? I don’t know. Hugely helps me anyway.

2) my own voice mixed back into that speaker. Louder than you’d think. Cuts my volume by maybe 30%. Voice is much better at the end of the day. Echo cancellation on zoom takes it out completely.

Those two tweaks changed everything for me during the pandemic. It took a lot of messing around. For example the speaker I use is a $15 Logitech because higher quality speakers feed back. And the mic is a long shotgun which minimises the amount of sound it picks up from that speaker.

All this should be easy.

It is not.

>1) a single loudspeaker for the speaker’s voice. For some reason stereo is tiring. Brain can’t locate the speaker in space already and then the voice comes from two different places? I don’t know. Hugely helps me anyway.

Damn, that's an interesting observation! It's certainly unnatural for the sound of the person you're talking to to originate from two separate points in space. I wonder if anyone studied this.

Do you get the same effect with headphones?

Disclaimer: Didn’t read the article, because I assume it is the same posted previously.

My rant: Meetings are just simply soul sucking things regardless of being present in-person or zoom. At least when remote, I can standup and do some push ups, but when am in a room with many people and most often am just there to answer a random question now and then, it is very difficult because I tend to feel tired and fight might self from dozing off while also need to stay alert to pretend to be interested enough and respond if my feedback is required suddenly.

Face-to-face meeting are awesome if done in small group (2-4 people), anything large is mostly counter intuitive to me.

That being said, sometimes I appreciate why management and project owners/managers are paid bananas money, their daily routine is sitting through adult childrens’ quibbling and herding people towards common goals.

P.S. Not a manager, just plain pleb.

> At least when remote, I can standup and do some push ups

In the pre-pandemic world I was "the guy" who would do these also during physical meetings. My boss would get furious and some of my colleagues supported her. But I didn't care. If they prefer on their fat asses and want to develop all kinds of physical problems, that's on them. There is nothing on my work contract that prevents me from doing exercise during meetings. Finally they gave up but it was a ridiculous fight. I'm happy this crap is over now and I can take care of my health during boring hours-long meetings.

that’s honestly an amazing power move

One thing I really disliked when I was still in a job where I had lots of remote meetings was the awareness that a video stream of my face was constantly being broadcast to all participants, and I couldn’t say anything without it being full screen for everyone immediately. And it would stay full screen until someone else said something. This made any minor comment feel like something of top priority, and also a bit like a performance since it was video.

Related, what I disliked the most, especially in meetings with many participants, was the speed of the transition from no one being especially aware of my own presence, to - within a fraction of a second - completely filling everyone’s awareness, when speaking in a meeting.

> "A major implication of our study is that videoconferencing should be considered as a possible complement to face-to-face interaction, but not as a substitute," the authors wrote.

Why the assumption that seeing faces is valuable at all in a lecture? Where is the "no video" result?

I thought that was strange too, but I wonder if it was to reduce the number of variables. They wanted an experience as close to an in-person lecture as possible, but using Zoom.

Also if faces can be hidden, the lecture might as well be recorded and sent to students.

Business Insider on its crusade against WFH, nothing new.

Shameless plug: https://leadership.garden/zoom-fatigue/ - my post goes into the details of why and gives some tips on how to mitigate the root causes.