It’s hard to imagine how most of us until recently managed without video conferencing. In the current circumstances, this is a real find: the ability to arrange an online meeting, remember what colleagues and friends look like, and if you suddenly want or need to, just turn off the sound or image. Convenient, right? So why do so many of us get so tired of this whole process?
Name two essential components of the average weekday morning for the average manager. Charging and shower? No matter how it is – coffee and Zoom with colleagues, sometimes without even getting out of pajama pants. And, it would seem, it is so convenient: no need to waste time on getting ready, standing in morning traffic jams, then getting home from work … So why do many of those who recently enjoyed this opportunity slowly begin to hate it?
It seems that fatigue from Zoom and similar platforms should overtake only those who spend too much time on such calls – several hours a day, five days a week. But no: scientists say that replacing normal, natural, familiar communication with videoconferencing is not easy for most of us.
Jeremy Bailenson, professor and director of Stanford College’s Digital Human Interactions Lab, and colleagues conducted a small study to find out how and why so-called “Zoom fatigue” occurs. The fact is that communication in the usual sense is a complex interaction consisting of speech, gestures, movements and synchronism (that is, we interact with each other at the same time, immediately responding to each other’s behavior).
In this way, not only adults communicate: the movements of the newborn are synchronized with the speech of the one who takes care of him in the first days of his life. And in principle, such interaction online is also possible, but it takes too many resources to stay “in sync”. Any session in Zoom is fraught with constant tension, which is also due to technical features: sound delay, problems with image transmission. We are not always able to read the body language of the interlocutor, to respond in time to his remark.
If the screen is large, we subconsciously perceive what is depicted on it as a threat.
“When communicating via video, we are constantly trying to determine (even if unconsciously) whether it is our turn to speak, whether it is time to answer the interlocutor, whether he is following our thought,” explains Steve Harrison, a professor at Virginia Tech University. We are asking about something, but due to the delay in the sound, we may not get an answer right away. There is a strange feeling that we are talking to ourselves.”
Another source of stress is the format of the image: we see ourselves differently than in the mirror, and often what we see we do not like at all. Moreover, it happens that throughout the conversation we keep looking at ourselves, trying to control how we look, which also does not allow us to relax. Small windows with images of the participants in the conversation, a full-screen portrait of the speaker – all this is also rather unnatural. And besides, if the screen is large, we subconsciously perceive what is depicted on it as a threat: the sympathetic nervous system is activated and the “fight or flight” reaction can be triggered.
And finally, many participants in the studies note that the interlocutors (especially their eyes) often look unnatural. Psychologist Susan Pinker talks about research on the biochemical reactions that occur in the course of communication in various formats: in person, on social networks and on the phone. Their results confirm that face-to-face dialogue releases the most neurotransmitters – dopamine, which gives us a feeling of joy, and oxytocin, which promotes communication.
Why is it so important to know about all this? If only because, perhaps, videoconferencing is not a temporary measure, but our new reality, a sign of the “brave new world”, because many companies do not plan to return employees to the offices. This means that we all will have to adapt in one way or another, learn to communicate with each other through the screens of our monitors.