Zoom Fatigue

Hey everybody, Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute. This week, I am coming to you from my home office, where I have been working just like you guys have for the last many months. And if you look at the screens behind me, you can see how I spend most of my days, and I know it's how you're spending most of your days. Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, Zoom. And I don't know about you, but I have Zoom fatigue. And everything I'm reading is that all of us have Zoom fatigue, that it is more difficult to stay in a Zoom meeting and stay connected with that eye contact where you never feel like you are off screen, you never feel unlike a regular meeting where sometimes everyone's not looking at you. On Zoom, it feels like everybody's always looking at you, and you have to be always looking at them. And there's all kinds of articles and research about how we're feeling about all this screen time. I don't know what happened when COVID hit, but all of a sudden, it was like we had to be on Zoom every time we communicated with each other. And you know what? We don't! The phone works just fine. If you're not doing a screen share, if it's not a meeting where you're doing a lot of collaboration, but in most cases, when you're doing a one-on-one conversation with someone, it's perfectly appropriate to have a phone call. So, before you automatically send the Zoom link, ask whoever you're setting the meeting up with if they really want to be on Zoom. And the language I've been using is: "I know a lot of people are really feeling Zoom fatigue right now. Do you feel like this conversation requires us to be on video or would you prefer a phone call?" So, I let whoever setting the meeting up decide. So, if they want to be on Zoom, that's fine. But you know what? About 75% of the time, they say, "Oh, thank God you suggested a phone call. Yes, let's get on the phone." So, as you enter into 2021 and you start setting up meetings, just be mindful of how exhausted people are from being on Zoom all day and be a little more judicious about deciding when a Zoom meeting is required and when a good old-fashioned phone call will do just fine. All right? I'll see you next week probably on Zoom.