First Aid for Zoom Fatigue – Tweaks and advice

Zoom fatigue is not necessary at all. With some small tweaks and better designed meetings, you can make a big difference for yourself and the people around you. Make sure that every voice is heard, and your online meeting will be a success. Your group will leave the session full of inspiration and energy for follow-up.

1. Protect your brain

Stanford published a study on the causes of Zoom fatigue. From this study the following tips can be derived to keep your brain in shape.

• Exit full screen

It is very tiring for your brain to see your colleagues or strangers on a big screen, especially if you have Zoom in speaker view. When someone is so close to you in a physical space, it is usually in an intimate or aggressive situation. Your brain is in a hyper-activated state due to the visual impulse. To make the experience more comfortable, exit full screen.

• Hide self-view

It is also exhausting to see yourself talking, laughing, making decisions and giving advice. It's like someone is chasing you with a mirror all the time. You would not want that in the office either. You are more critical of yourself when you see your reflection and that contributes to fatigue. This is easily solved by turning on ‘hide self-view’ as soon as you know that you look fine. Others can still see your image.

• Move

Movement helps alleviate Zoom fatigue. See if you can stand while video calling or replace a video consultation with an old school telephone call as you take a walk. Change the duration of your standard invite for appointments on Outlook to twenty or fifty minutes. This will give you a moment to water the plants. Movement helps your brain recover, and often produces better cognitive results.

2. Formulate a specific reason for the meeting

Formulate a clear and exciting topic for the meeting, and then everyone will want to participate. 'Focus on the coming year' is much more boring than 'Super cooperation between the programs department and field offices'.

You can clarify your desired outcome of the meeting by thinking of a central question for your participants to answer. The best central questions start with 'How can we…'.

View the meeting from the participants’ perspective. You can do this by writing down what you want them to think, feel and do when they hit the ‘leave meeting’ button. Zoom fatigue makes way for focus and contact.

3. Transfer knowledge before the meeting

The maximum attention of a participant during an online session is three minutes. After that, they check their mail or clean the kitchen. Therefore, a presentation should not last longer than three minutes. Invite your speaker to name three points that the participants need to know to answer the central question. Give them one minute per point. Record lengthy talks and panels without expecting everyone to watch them simultaneously.

With some tricks, you can keep your colleagues actively involved. Share your screen while creating a mind map in Miro; they may wonder what will appear next. You could use a stylus on a trackpad to mesmerise your audience. Check off points on your PowerPoint with the digital pen, or illustrate them on the spot with drawings that you base on icons from the noun project. You could split a long presentation into shorter pieces. This gives the participants time to apply their own situation to each part.

Make every effort to transfer knowledge prior to the meeting, as its purpose is to come together to talk about it. How do you transfer the knowledge needed for the online conversation? Experiment with voice messages in your group app, VideoAsk or use other accessible techniques. Ask your participants to prepare a question to ask the speaker or each other during the session.

4. Everyone can contribute

Reduce Zoom fatigue by only inviting people who can answer the central question together. It is energising when someone asks you to contribute. Passive participants should do something else instead of attending the meeting.

The great advantage of online events is that everyone can talk at the same time. You can do this by pairing them up in breakout rooms. Zoom, Webex, Teams, and many other tools have this feature. Have the groups discuss a specific question for five to ten minutes. For example, questions from the methods of the Liberating Structures.

When everyone is back in the plenary room, each participant can simultaneously write their answer to the question in the chat. Invite one or two participants to take the floor and repeat their answer in a few sentences so that the speaker can reflect on it. The group can then dive deeper with the next question. Repeat this until they have answered the central question of your session.