If you’ve spent too many remote meetings unproductively staring at your co-workers ’glazed expressions, a new study offers you a solution: keep the camera off next time.
It seems counterintuitive that turning off the camera leads to more productive meetings, but this is what researchers at the University of Arizona Eller College of Management recently found during a four-week experiment. According to the study’s authors, video withdrawal allowed people to stop focusing on their own faces and focus more on the content of the meetings.
In video calls, people often feel that they are being “looked at,” so they are focused on their expressions and how other people can perceive them, says Allison Gabriel, a professor of management and organizations at McClelland and Distinguished Scholar. of the University of Arizona and one of the authors of the study. This becomes tiring, which makes people less likely to participate and express new ideas in meetings, she says.
The solution is not to completely give up video conferencing, Gabriel says, but to give people the autonomy to choose whether they are on camera or not. The assumption that you need to be on camera to participate is obsolete and employees should feel empowered to talk to their colleagues and managers about camera etiquette and expectations for specific meetings, she says.
Gabriel recommends another useful strategy: Every morning, review your calendar meetings and decide which ones you should be on camera in advance, to help you keep up with the pace and prevent video wear and tear. You may need to show your face individually with your manager, for example, but you could have a silent company-wide meeting, perhaps even off your desk.
If you can, resist the urge to schedule all meetings on camera in a row to end them. This will only increase fatigue, Gabriel says. Interestingly, she adds, she and her co-authors found no significant relationship between fatigue levels and the total number of meetings or hours spent meeting a day. It all came down to using the camera.
Some people are more susceptible to video call fatigue than others, Gabriel says. Women in the workforce have an expectation of “demonstrating competence” because of unfair gender assumptions that are distracted from home care tasks while working, according to the study. And newer employees often feel extra pressure to hold meetings because they haven’t established relationships or relationships with other people in the organization, Gabriel says.
Some jobs require on-camera meetings out of necessity: distance learning teachers probably experience more video calls than software engineers, for example. Future research, according to the study, could explore how different camera views, such as wide-angle or wide-angle cameras that don’t film you from the front, could affect people’s performance.
These future investigations could be key to combating exhaustion. With companies across the country delaying back-to-office dates, many Americans could be working remotely for an indefinite future.
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