[ad_1]
If you’ve spent too many remote meetings unproductive gazing at coworkers’ glassy expressions, a new study has a solution for you: Just turn off your camera next time.
It seems counterintuitive that turning off your camera will lead to more productive meetings, but that’s what researchers at the University of Arizona Eller College of Management recently discovered in an experiment. four weeks. According to the study’s authors, the removal of the video allowed people to stop focusing on their own faces and focus more on meeting content.
On video calls, people often feel like they’re being ‘watched’ so they’re hyper focused on their expressions and how others might perceive them, says Allison Gabriel, McClelland Professor of Management and Organizations and distinguished University of Arizona scholar, and one of the study’s authors. It becomes tiring, which makes people less likely to engage and express new ideas in meetings, she says.
The solution is not to give up video conferencing altogether, Gabriel says, but to give people the autonomy to choose whether they are in front of the camera or not. The assumption that you have to be in front of the camera to be involved is outdated, and employees should feel empowered to talk to their colleagues and managers about camera etiquette and expectations for specific meetings, she says.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 helpful strategy: every morning, review the meetings on your calendar and decide ahead of time which ones need to be filmed ahead of time, to help keep you going and avoid video burnout. You might need to show up one-on-one with your manager, for example, but you could potentially host a larger company-wide meeting on mute, maybe even away from your desk.
If you can, resist the urge to schedule all your on-camera meetings one after the other to get it over with. It will only increase fatigue, says Gabriel. Interestingly, she adds, she and her coauthors found no significant relationship between fatigue levels and the total number of meetings or hours spent in meetings per day. It all boiled down to using the camera.
Some people are more susceptible to video call fatigue than others, says Gabriel. Women in the workforce face an expectation to “demonstrate their skills” due to unfair sexist assumptions that they are distracted from home care duties while working, the study notes. And new hires tend to feel extra pressure to perform well during meetings because they haven’t established relationships or relationships with other people in the organization, says Gabriel.
Some jobs necessarily require on-camera meetings: educators who teach remotely likely experience more video calls than software engineers, for example. According to the study, future research could explore how different camera views – like side or wide-angle cameras that don’t shoot you from the front – might impact people’s performance.
Such future research could be essential in tackling burnout. With companies across the country delaying their return-to-office dates, many Americans could be working remotely in the indefinite future.
Register now: Get more information about your money and career with our weekly newsletter
Don’t miss:
[ad_2]
Source link