Three ways to avoid virtual meeting fatigue

listeners that have been leaving reviews. I think in the Australian Apple Podcasts app there an hour over for one hundred reviews for How I Work, mostly five stars. Thank you, You're awesome. And I thought i'd just read out a couple of lovely reviews that I've received in the last few weeks that I really do just bring such a big smile to my face. So this one's from Fiery five. Have've just discovered this podcast and I'm really enjoying pulling gems out of every episode, many of which are very

quick and easy to apply. Thanks Amantha, thank you so much. Then from Presh fifteen, this is an incredible podcast hosted by Mattha Imber, who is a great interviewer. I listened to this before my workday and it puts me in such a positive and productive mindset. Thank you so much. And one other one that I got recently from Ti huruas love that your podcast very in length. I find the episodes useful and I've been able to apply some of the strategies to improve my performance at work. Thanks

so much. Well, thank you guys, Thank you. And look, if you're enjoying the work that I do on How I Work, you might be keen to check out another podcast that I launched a couple of months ago now called how to Date. How to Date, which I linked to in the show notes. And this is a podcast all about the crazy world of dating when you did not think that you would be dating again in this lifetime.

So it is our podcast, hosted by myself and my closest girlfriend Monique, and we interview all sorts of experts from around the world on how to get better at dating. So, if you're interested in that, if you're single, or maybe if you're not single but you just want to live vicariously through Monique and I, search for How to Date wherever you listen to your podcasts. Okay, let's get onto today's mini episode. Which is all about how to avoid

virtual meeting fatigue. So, despite lockdown restrictions easing across Australia, if you happen to be based here, many of us are still working from home and for a lot of us, we've discovered that we actually like working from home for the majority of the time and have no desire to go back to the office five days a week. And if workers and teams remain distributed, with some people working from home and some working from the office, virtual meetings

will rain. Unfortunately, virtual meetings have a pretty bad reputation, which is often rightly deserved. They can be tire, in effectively run, and often a chance for us to take a sneaky check of our email or social media feeds when things get a bit dull. I know I have been there now. Our negative relationship with virtual meetings is a serious problem. Research has consistently found the satisfaction with

meetings predicts how satisfied we are with our jobs. So one study found that more than fifteen percent of our job satisfaction is based on our satisfaction with the meetings we attend, and other studies have found that meeting satisfaction is the single biggest predictor of job satisfaction, so it's important that we use our time well in meetings. And this is even more true of virtual meetings because of

the additional problems they pose. So if the virtual meetings that you're attending or running are sacking the life out of you and others, here are a few strategies to make virtual meetings more productive and less sleep inducing. Okay, my first hip is to cap virtual meetings at thirty minutes or at very least take frequent breaks. So research from Microsoft found that virtual meeting fatigue is indeed a

real thing. Researchers from Microsoft's Human Factors Lab had participants where an EEG device that monitored brain weighs sharing virtual meetings. Perhaps not surprisingly, the research has found that people's concentration started to fade at the thirty to forty minute mark when a person's days were filled with virtual meetings. Stress levels began to rise after about two hours into their

meeting filled day. So the researchers suggested that focusing on a screen to extract relevant information can be exhausting and it can be hard to remain engaged. In addition, due to the limited nonverbal cues it can be harder to get a read on people and know whose turn it is to talk, for example. And finally, when sharing screens a like you do when you're sharing a presentation or something, the view of people becomes tiny and almost eliminates any

visual cues that you were previously able to get. So cap virtual meetings at thirty minutes, and if they have to go longer, take short regular breaks to help people maintain focus and energy. Okay, my next tip is to ask better questions. So what's the first question that gets asked in most meetings? Aside from can you hear me? Put yourself off mute? Well, most meetings start with the question how are you going? And how do people answer? Good? Fine? Okay?

So boring questions elicit boring answers and fail to build stronger connections. Challenging yourself to ask a more provocative or interesting question that will elicit a surprising answer or gain further insight into the person or people you are meeting with is a very effective way to go. So, for example, you might start a meeting by asking what are people most proud of this week? What's the their favorite room in their home, or what's an unexpected upside from COVID.

So asking better questions is one method to create a high quality connection, which is a term coined by Professor Jane Dutton from the University of Michigan. High Quality connections are interactions you have with someone virtually or face to face in which both people feel lit up and energized by the connection. And the beauty of high quality connections is that they don't require significant time. They can be

as short as just a five minute conversation. So research shows that high quality connections have a myriad of benefits, including helping us be more creative, resilient, and even live longer. But beyond helping us thrive individually, they also contribute to team and organizational effectiveness. So when teams have high quality connections, which you can build through meetings and asking better questions, team members are more creative, more coordinated, and more likely

to have mutual respect for one another. Now, the final tip I have is to default to the telephone. So, in the world of remote work, people's default meeting time is a meeting type has actually become video. So to help overcome virtual meeting fatigue, experiment with having phone meetings

as your default. So on his podcast Work Life, Wharton professor Adam Grant, who has also been a guest on How I Work, shared research that we are actually better at reading emotions and empathizing with people over the phone compared to via video, which seems completely counterintuitive, doesn't it.

So the phone eliminates all the visual cues that can distract from us honing in on the actual human we are communicating with, and also phone calls allow us to be moving around and thus reduce the fatigue that can set in when we are desk bound all day. So if you are suffering from virtual meeting fatigue, try one of these three strategies, maybe this week to help make your meetings a whole lot better. That is it for

today's show. If you are enjoying How I Work, make sure that you've hit the subscribe button wherever you listen to this podcast from and you will be alerted as to whenever a new episode drops, which regular listeners will know is every Tuesday and Thursday. And if you're enjoying How I Work, why not be like one of the several hundred people that have left reviews for the show and leave one today in Apple Podcasts. It really does make my day and a huge thank you to everyone

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