New research published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology indicates that some previously widely held understandings about how employees respond to virtual meetings may have been wrong.
While many virtual meeting participants can attest to feeling some degree of fatigue during the event, earlier studies on the phenomenon seemed to suggest that mental overload - presumably stress from using new technology and/or performing on camera - was predominantly to blame.
A team from Aalto University, however, conducted both ethnographic and physiological research, including measuring the heart rate variability of participants across more than 400 meetings (both virtual and in-person), and found the opposite to be true - that, in fact, fatigue during virtual meetings was being caused by a lack of mental stimulation, a condition otherwise sometimes known as boredom.
Aside from turning the traditional understanding of virtual-meeting-fatigue on its head, perhaps the most important insight that this research brings to light is that not everyone actually experiences virtual-meeting fatigue in the same way.
From survey information collected alongside the aforementioned biometric data, the research team found that whether the meeting was in-person or virtual made little difference to employees who are on the upper ends of the work engagement and enthusiasm spectrums, whereas employees who claim to be less engaged with or enthusiastic about their work have more difficulty maintaining their focus during virtual meetings.
The drop in held attention during virtual meetings can be especially steep for employees with lower baseline work enthusiasm/engagement in part because of the limited sensory input and interaction cues they can intercept through video format.
As a result, the fatigue effect can be particularly pronounced when video chat is turned off, which exacerbates understimulation and will often lead affected employees to multitask as a means of counterbalancing the stimulation deficit. Although not all multi-tasking activities are equality taxing, of course, and some require very little mental exertion while enabling participants to stay engaged with a virtual meeting at the same time (e.g. walking on a treadmill or playing with a fidget spinner), most attempts at multitasking lead to missed information, brain exhaustion, or both.
Given that the data collected from this study pushes against the consensus that had been building behind the idea that mental overload was at fault for virtual-meeting fatigue, more research will certainly be required to confirm these findings, but as virtual meetings become increasing ingrained among standard business practices, it’s worth keeping an eye on this space as our understanding continues to evolve.
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