Hybrid work is here to stay, but we still have a lot to learn about hosting meaningful virtual meetings.
Roughly three-quarters of working adults who use online conferencing services say they are fine with the amount of time they spend on video calls. In contrast, 26 percent say they are worn out by it, according to a January 2022 Pew Research study.
The Pew study also revealed that those who are new to remote work are more likely to use videoconferencing than are those who have traditionally worked from home. This suggests virtual meeting newcomers may be unfamiliar with standard video etiquette and strategies to reduce fatigue.
To help your team create a healthy video meeting culture, you should document video meeting guidelines that help promote your team’s well-being and ensure everyone understands how to best navigate a video meeting. Let’s explore how to begin establishing your guidelines and the key areas to consider.
Assess Your Video Meeting Health
Before creating virtual meeting guidelines, it is necessary to reevaluate your current meeting culture and employees’ needs. The past two-plus years have significantly changed how most teams work, and you need to understand your new baseline.
To start, survey your team members and speak with them one-on-one. Seek to understand their new working arrangements, including how and where they take video calls. Ask about their comfort with video meetings, their challenges and how they think your team can better support them. What causes them stress during meetings? Do meetings often run too long? Does one person do most of the talking?
As you survey team members, create a list of the meeting types your organization typically holds. The list should include everything from internal team meetings to organizationwide all-hands, brainstorms, customer meetings and candidate interviews.
Common Video Conferencing Guideline Elements
After you survey your team and document your common meeting types, you can begin to build your video communication guidelines. It is best to view these as guardrails for your team and not as a list of mandates.
Consider all of the following areas, noting that certain types of meetings may allow for a more casual environment than other types:
- Backgrounds—Are virtual backgrounds necessary, or do you find them distracting? Ideally, you should provide branded backgrounds that your team can use.
- Camera on or off—Are team members required to be on camera during meetings? When is this essential? When is it optional?
- How to use in-platform messaging and reactions—What is your videoconferencing platform, and what features does it include? How should team members use in-platform messaging or reaction features during meetings?
- Mute nonspeakers—Encourage anyone who is not speaking to mute their microphones. This limits unnecessary noise in the meeting and helps everyone hear the speaker.
- Silence notifications—Ask team members to silence any notifications that may pull their attention from the meeting, including ringtones and email alerts.
- Stay seated or move around—Is it OK for team members to get up during a meeting? When should they announce it, and how?
4 Ways to Combat Zoom Fatigue
Even with thorough video meeting guidelines, your team may need additional tips and resources to reduce their video call fatigue. Based on recent studies, putting the following four tips into practice can be vital for building a healthy video meeting culture:
- Turn off your self-view camera stream. The number one cause of Zoom fatigue is participants viewing their own video stream, according to a group of University of Georgia researchers led by Kristen Shockley. Locking into in an endless staring contest with oneself amplifies feelings of stress and quickly drains your energy. Luckily, this has an easy fix: Encourage meeting participants to hide their camera stream from their own video meeting interface.
- Take frequent pauses. According to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, video meeting concentration starts to decline at about 30 minutes. Stress increases after two hours of videoconferencing. Schedule meetings for no longer than 45 minutes so that there is a 15-minute break period between back-to-back meetings.
- Move beyond passive video meeting calls. Before scheduling a meeting, ask yourself if a video call is the best format for achieving your goal. Ask whether a more engaging tools such as collaborative whiteboards are better ways to communicate information and receive feedback.
- Build your BEANs. Behavior enablers, artifacts and nudges—or BEANs—support innovation, as described in depth in the book Eat, Sleep, Innovate: How to Make Creativity an Everyday Habit Inside Your Organization. BEANs work great to evolve your virtual meeting strategy, as well. The process involves identifying your desired characteristics and common blockers. Then, you generate interventions that eliminate the blockers to enable your desired behavior.
Evolve Your Video Meeting Guidelines Over Time
Your video meeting guidelines are a living document. They are not chiseled in stone for eternity. Continually check in with your team to see how they are progressing and take note of new challenges team members encounter. Encourage everyone to provide feedback and plan to update your guidelines on a quarterly basis in order to build and maintain the healthiest possible video meeting culture.
By being transparent and keeping your employees’ concerns top of mind throughout the process, your team can combat Zoom fatigue and host truly effective meetings.
06 July 2022
Category
HR News Article