Have you ever noticed that your energy levels vary a lot after meetings? Do you feel differently after a face-to-face meeting versus a virtual meeting? Does the meeting content or structure make a difference?
Meeting research has become more popular in recent years, especially as virtual meetings are now being compared to face-to-face meetings. We can all agree that virtual meetings are different than face-to-face meetings. Sometimes, they can be harder, yet the benefits of remote work are undeniable. Today, we want to share some interesting findings from a new study to help you understand virtual meeting fatigue and how to avoid it.
How Virtual Meeting Fatigue Looks
When I know I have a long day of meetings ahead of me, I think I’m going to end the day exhausted. Exhaustion is considered active fatigue. It stems from effortful attention and working on a hard task. It’s not uncommon to end a back-to-back meeting day feeling exhausted.
However, we often don’t think about passive fatigue. Yet, a new study finds that passive fatigue is actually more common after virtual meetings. So, what is passive fatigue? It comes from low workload, passive tasks, and monotonous work. It’s basically that sleepiness or drowsiness you feel when you are bored for a long time. Imagine being in a long virtual meeting where your role is to just listen. If you are at all like me, you might find yourself yawning a bunch. Unfortunately, this is a common experience with virtual meetings.
Virtual meeting fatigue is often drowsiness.
What Drowsiness Does
Being sleepy or drowsy is never fun at work. It can make getting through the rest of the work day a struggle. Plus, researchers find that drowsiness leads to lower cognitive flexibility. In other words, when you are drowsy, you have a harder time switching contexts, shifting your thinking to different topics, and processing multiple concepts at once.
As you can imagine, this can have a big impact on your performance at work – especially for knowledge workers. We are often asked to shift gears at work, even within the same meeting. If it’s hard to do so, you can miss important pieces of information in meetings, perform worse on tasks, and fall behind, creating a long to-do list for the future. In addition, drowsy employees lose motivation, which can cause an avoidance of difficult work tasks.
In summary, drowsiness has a major impact on your performance at work, in addition to the obvious impact on how you are feeling in the moment.
How to Fight Virtual Meeting Fatigue
Luckily, we don’t have to all sit through virtual meetings and end up drowsy. There are some important considerations as we move forward in a continued virtual and hybrid work environment.
First, leaders need to focus on employee engagement. Employees that are highly engaged at work are much less likely to experience virtual meeting fatigue, including drowsiness. Thus, leadership teams need to measure employee engagement, evaluate areas of improvement, and work to create an environment that engages employees.
On that note, leaders and meeting owners need to ensure their virtual meetings are engaging. The biggest problems come in when people are bored. If everyone is able to participate actively, they are less likely to disengage from the meeting and fall into low workload. Think critically about how to engage everyone in the meeting. Before that, think about the right attendees. Maybe not everyone is always necessary in every meeting.
Finally, be very intentional with your meetings. Limit the number of meetings you are in each day, if possible. Try to leverage breaks as we’ve discussed before. Also, consider which meetings should be face-to-face versus virtual. Long days of meetings where a lot of people need to listen may actually be better in-person. Think about how to use onsite time intentionally and save those longer meetings for the times you can all be together in person.
