Learning from Zoom Fatigue and Samaritans: Understanding The Beast

At the very beginning of Britain’s first lockdown, I began a research project with the aim of forecasting the resultant societal changes, the likely future. My mother is a Samaritan volunteer and trainer, so through her I was able to access a diverse set of 20 volunteers, all happy to be interviewed on the phone. Over these interviews, in weeks 2 - 6 of lockdown, I came to realise that these volunteers were not simply valuable as a diverse dataset; they were the perfect people to explain a prime challenge that we face under social distancing; connection. Samaritans are trained to provide therapeutic support to callers, and to each other, in-person. They understand that through good communication, emotional weight can be lifted off the backs of the isolated, and those who feel truly connected can be empowered to take on heavy work. This is the kind of communication that is essential for staying afloat in lockdown.

Over the course of these interviews, I became focussed on work-based communication, though naturally they have relevance to other settings of communication, it’s just easier for respondents to talk about work than home. As my area of research became more focussed, my project’s basic aims changed. Rather than analysing the likely future, I focussed on understanding the present, and the possible, ideal future. What have we really lost in the stampede to video calls? How can we learn from this and adapt? How can we change our communication mediums to feel connected whilst distanced? This article and its follow-up will each offer one suggestion for facilitating connection, advice that is not found in TED, HBR or the BBC’s articles on Zoom fatigue. This article, will offer a personal skills-based solution - the prioritisation of active listening - and the following article will offer a macro, organisation-level solution, which I have named the Third Zone. All names have been changed.

So, back to the context of lockdown. Two experiences have been shared by nearly everyone whose work - or lack of it - has suddenly moved home; mood swings and Zoom fatigue. Video calls are now used overwhelmingly by everyone from town councils and schools through to financial advisors and engineering firms. For some, they have been a lifeline. This report focusses on those still in full-time work, but some of my interviewees had first-hand experience with the a different group of Britons, the group deemed most active and least lonely by UCL researchers; our the Over-60s. UCL’s results were particularly impressive considering that this group included those over 70 who were required to self-isolate.

Emerson, one of my respondents, delivers food to over 70s, many of whom have recently learned to use Facetime; ‘they all say it has really kept them going’. Some have taken the technology further; Emerson recounted a neighbour’s decision to post one of his Guess Who boards to his family, so they could play the game over video call. A quaint story, but its significance should not be missed; adapting communication can transform the experience of social distance. When asking respondents what they liked about video calls, a consistent answer was that they allow us to observe body language and take in visual cues, facilitating conversations that feel more real, more human than a phone call.

Why did this same adaptation of communication work so well for some, whilst others find themselves longing for a break? An overwhelming majority of professional teams have attempted to use Zoom for to facilitate emotional support and social connection, just as the Over-60s have, holding work-free calls once or twice a week to check up on each other. One of the key reasons why this has often failed is that professional teams often lack the kind of mutual understanding that is necassary for a satisfying video call.

One Samaritans volunteer who was particularly helpful in developing my understanding of the issue was Frankie, who coordinated international engineering projects in his day-job, involving heavy use of video calls over the last 6 years. Frankie pointed out that most people do not actually, objectively understand body language, to such an extent that an explosion of temper in a conversation member can come as a total surprise to the others. We intuitively assume that we can read body language over video call, because we often find this to be true, but we overestimate our abilities in general. This is not to say Frankie isn’t pro-Zoom; he enormously appreciates the ability to make enormous savings on travel, says that in comparison to phone calls they ‘feel that bit more human’, and thus are 97% as good as meeting a client in person, provided you already know them. To reach this point, to ‘understand the beast’ as he puts it, requires informal, in-person meetings. This is why we feel that we can read body language over video calls; many of the people we call are already personally known to us, we know what they look like when they are content or frustrated.

Our assumption that we can read body language over Zoom contributes to the grander problem with the medium, which I describe as exposure. We spend energy attempting to control the cues we send on Zoom, particularly whilst bearing the cognitive load of professionalism (economic uncertainty contributes to job-fears) and sensitivity (emotional issues such as cabin fever and mood swings are frequent). Avery, a volunteer whose management work often included HR issues, stated that to take a Samaritan calls by video ‘you’d have to form your face into exactly the right expression for that emotion in every moment, it would be really difficult.’ Some discussions feel more satisfying over video call, whereas others simply feel wrong.

The most challenging video calls are those with the most people, giving rise to a feeling of intrusion made worse by options such as gallery mode. These video calls do not simulate the experience of a conversation whose members are sat around a table, periodically turning to face whoever is talking. More than anything else, gallery mode’s wall of faces simulates the exposure of a job interview, and a particularly punishing interview at that. One of my respondes respondent, Morgan, described a method for dealing with this discomfort; simply look directly into the camera when talking, ignoring all the faces onscreen. Morgan came up with this technique when addressing a pre-lockdown video presentation to his managers, in order stop himself from nervously watching their faces and pre-judging their reactions. The best personal-level piece of advice I can offer today is this; whever possible, attempt to practice active listening, and enable this by taking more calls through pure audio.

Active listening is the technique that came up most frequently in interviews, when I asked what aspects of Samaritans training has been helpful in general life, described by Frankie as imparting ‘the immense ability to only think about what they’re saying, go on the journey they’re on’, stating that when successful, ‘you realize how rarely you do that.’ This rung true with my own experiences, when talking to a friend who would frustratingly respond to sentences before I finished saying them, making it clear that he had started thinking about his response before I finished speaking, and thus that he was reacting to some of my words, not all of them. He was listening in a sense, and his response was related to my point, but only tangentially, he was going on the same journey as me. To actively listen requires concentration, work which can be enormously therapeutic for the talker.

Frankie explained that, in some situations, a simple phone call can be far more ideal than a video call. While talking on the phone, you might fiddle around with your feet or gaze out of the window, if you wish. It might not seem obvious that this is a benefit, but it did to me, as I had spent much of our call watching nearby birds, and yet my mind was totally focused on Frankie’s words. I originally chose to conduct this project’s interviews by phone rather than Zoom, for the simple reason that I didn’t want them to feel like work, the last thing I wanted was to add stress to Samaritans’ lives. This decision facilitated a different kind of work; it was so much easier to think about the deeper implications of respondents’ comments when I wasn’t simultaneously constituting myself on camera.

It should also be noted that the audio quality of a phone call is often clearer than that on video; I frequently find myself awkwardly slowing Zoom conversations when a quiet utterance from me like ‘oh yes’ or ‘ah wow’ is misheard by the person I’m responding to, leading them to break their train of thought in order to check what I was saying. These utterances or minor intonations (such as ‘mmhmm’) should ideally be an easy, intuitive way to demonstrate to the talker that you are following said train of thought, an easy way to confirm one is actively listening. It is still possible to do this outside of an audio call though; Avery was amongst the Samaritans volunteers trialing an instant text messaging service for those unable to talk out loud, she said that adapting to this medium involved focusing on confirming understanding in written form. Of course, it is possible to practice active listening through a video call, particularly when talking to the right person. And of course, this is only a method for improving some work-based communication, not a grander solution to the issue of maintaining connection within teams. For that, you will need to read my next article…