Why Do Our Brains Struggle With Virtual Meeting?

This article was originally published on docvox.io

Humans across the world have now become accustomed to the virtual work environment, a change ushered in by COVID-19. A change that has been described to be an “under-appreciated source of stress” (Oliver, 2022). This comes from the viral increase in video conferencing calls in 2021 and 2020. Evidently, in video calls, the environment pushes humans’ focus and cognitive processing to their limits compared to the status quo of face-to-face conversations. This can cause mental fatigue in many cases.

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“The evidence suggests that our narrowing attention span is a challenge that we must face with creative solutions that can adapt to the workplace. ”

Promote?human attention

In addition to the added stress of virtual meetings, our shorter than ever attention spans can not cope with this change. It is sufficient to see that the human attention span has dropped to eight seconds - decreasing by nearly 25% in the span of a few years (Global attention span is narrowing and trends don't last as long, study reveals, 2022). Therefore, holding extensively long meetings can negatively affect the total information retention amongst the attendees. It is not a physiological change but an environmental change; the worldly noise competing for our attention is growing increasingly. Additionally, the literature suggests that the absence of physical cues, which normally facilitate memory recall, can be a reason behind the weak retention from virtual environments. Essentially, such cues help guide the brain to reconstruct an internal representation of the physical context associating it with the information gathered.

In the context of virtual meetings’ management, all of the previously presented information represents a challenge for the speaker as well as the attendees. A challenge DocVox understands deeply and aims to solve through its smart meeting assistant. It will allow attendees to not lose track of the flow of the conversation while having access to the information discussed after the meeting. The evidence presented beforehand suggests that our narrowing attention span is a challenge that we must face with creative solutions that can adapt to the workplace. Solutions that we believe DocVox is the crown of, creating a vivid and smooth virtual meeting environment.

Do you want to be more attentive in virtual meeting??Try implementing DocVox in your process!

Sources

[1] Oliver, K., 2022.?Are you feeling Zoom-ed out? You are not alone. [online] Vanderbilt University. Available at:<https://medschool.vanderbilt.edu/basic-sciences/2020/10/01/are-you-feeling-zoom-ed-out-you-are-not-alone/> [Accessed 12 January 2022].

[2] The Guardian. 2022. Global attention span is narrowing and trends don't last as long, study reveals. [online] Available at: <https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/apr/16/got-a-minute-global-attention-span-is-narrowing-study-reveals> [Accessed 12 January 2022].