Reading the article it sounds a bit like he is describing zoom/video-conf as sort of the uncanny valley of in person communications. We want to make sense of it in the usual way as it is close but the differences stress the process and tire the individual.
I'm also curios if this will at all be relatable to how introverts find in person communication tiring. Maybe that same stress is at work there but from the start, without the need for the differences introduce by zoom. It will be interesting to see how the research on this plays out.
I spend a lot of time on calls of different sorts and I've found that I really prefer voice only and I think it allows for slightly higher quality discussion. Informal video where everyone is free to drift in and out of frame works really well too.
Eh, it's somewhat forgivable. How on earth are you going to get a headline like "Zoom Fatigue Is Real, According to My Experience" to work? If I posted that onto HN, I'd get 100 people telling me that actually, remote is fine and just as good as in-person, if not better.
We got accustomed to it, but it never stopped feeling super weird, I think, somewhere deep in our heads.
A wall of faces staring at your neck is not what any real in-person thing feels like. A wall of facings looking in your eyes isn’t, either, for that matter, but the constantly-averted-gazes do add even more to the weirdness. You don’t feel so constantly watched in person, unless you’re doing a presentation.
I did a little work with one of the Big 3 management consulting firms about… oh, four or five years back, well after everyone cool and most non-cool had adopted Zoom or some other video chat for work calls. They favored actual dial-in conference calls. At first I thought they were dinosaurs, but the more I considered it the more I thought they had the right idea. Nothing to download or permissions to allow. Doesn’t tie up your laptop. Don’t need a laptop out at all, in fact. Phone number and code digits are all you need, can record that on a napkin.
Mass video chat’s so weird that I’m not sure the video’s adding value anyway, if you’re not screen sharing.
I absolutely hate calls. WFH works well when you just need to grind out something solo, but it’s awful to communicate.
Personally I go in the office 1-2 days a week. If you want to talk to me, do it in person those days. If you add me to some 10 person video call. I’m just going to zone out.
Because video off meetings are entirely pointless and just shouldn't be run. Not to say that turning video on magically makes the meetings have point, but if you are muted, video off, and doing the dishes, you just shouldn't be in that call.
Requiring video on probably makes people push back against being invited to useless meetings rather than seeing it as an hour to clean the house.
As an individual you may as well do dishes, but as a company you should believe that your meetings are actually important, and if they are, everyone should be present and video on. At least that way there will be pushback against useless meetings.
I agree, but most (not all) don't have the leverage needed to get what they want. The boss thinks that dumb meeting makes them look good, so why would they want to let anyone opt out? Let one do it and the rest will follow, they figure.
So really, the options are typically 1) deal with it 2) quit.
People that schedule meetings like that don't want pushback. They're not trying to optimise the list of people in the meeting, they're trying to grow it at the expense of everything else.
They genuinely believe that whatever they're crapping on about to a brick wall for 2 hours straight is the most important thing in the universe and they want your undivided attention, productivity or profit be damned. That's why they force people to turn their cameras on.
You don't always have an option and when you do there are consequences. It cost me my grades in high school (during the lockdown, in an European country) because I was adamant on not wanting to show myself on camera. The same thing happened when looking for a job. I'd rather face the consequences rather than give in.
I feel like you need to compare a 10 person video call with a 10 person in office meeting. And of course, a hallway chat vs a 1-1 zoom call or discord exchange.
Ten person meetings have felt better for me in person. I think it's because there's more room for impromptu overlapping discussions, which Zoom doesn't support well.
This is the billion-dollar problem in VoIP. I call it the "cocktail party problem", because a cocktail party is the most extreme example. In meatspace, you're able to drift between conversations subtly queuing to the other participants in a breakout conversation that you're engaging with them, while still being able to pick up on nearby conversations which you can choose to swap to.
A multi-call system like a Discord server represents a small step, with the ability to see that conversations are happening in other calls, and maybe get a guess of what they're doing thanks to live presence, but it's far from a complete solution.
Gather Town was tackling this issue surprisingly well during COVID, but anytime I tried to convince people to use it they defaulted back to Zoom because Gather was too confusing. I think it would take a real paradigm shift from the "call with video" model to get decent adoption of something like that, and now that it's so expensive to use Gather I don't see how they can get enough exposure to really convince the public at large.
Perhaps another factor is that it doesn't seem like the nine other participants are always staring towards you, personally, specifically, persistently. There are breaks and ebbs and flows, as other people talk and you can take turns as an observer from the side.
I absolutely love calls, you don't have to type and you have the other person's (relatively) undivided attention. Plus cajoling, browbeating and instigating techniques work better and if called out you can put things down to 'tonal misunderstanding.' Also a lot of people these days can't truly understand written content because they don't grasp nuance and only interpret things literally. When you actually talk to them they tend to be a little less robotic and start inferring more so you don't have to spell things out so elaborately.
You know you can just have an in-person meeting. You also don't have to type and you also have the other person's undivided attention (perhaps even more so).
> a lot of people these days can't truly understand written content
It's a two way street. A lot of people are terrible at writing to communicate, especially in a time-sensitive context like Slack, and we remote workers are having to do a lot more written communication than when we were in the office.
> a lot of people these days can't truly understand written content because they don't grasp nuance and only interpret things literally.
There seems to be a disconnect between parts of this sentence. "Can't understend written content" because they "interpret things literally."
Why wouldn't they? If you have something to say, say it - or, in this case, write it.
Why leave things open to interpretation?
Furthermore, why not just say things literally in a video call or in-person meeting as well? Surely the only possibility is for less confusion this way.
Because unless you take half an hour to write 500 words you're always leaving things open to interpretation. A huge part of human communication is interpretation and inference.
When you have a verbal communication people bring up things they don't understand in realtime and you correct as you go so that, by the end of the conversation, a mutual understanding has been reached.
In writing - especially if you're sending emails - people are often reluctant to come back for more info as they think it'll make them look dumb, plus there's the 'inertia' factor plus the factor of not knowing whether you'll get a timely reply.
No matter how clear it is, the audio is half-duplex, meaning the small overlaps that are part of normal conversation control-flow instead make it crash and burn. Calls work fine for one way presentation or very structured Q&A, not so much for interactive discussion.
I .. really don't experience that, we're regularly 3 on zoom and we chat as if we were in our company offices. There are some audio issues if we really overlap too wildly but really it got to the point that seeing zoom webpage makes me smile.
+1. I’m looking forward to it becoming more commonplace as Apple get Vision into more hands - communicating in XR is way less fatiguing for me as there’s more spatial cues and body language. You can look at the speaker, it’s easier to tell when you can butt in, you can split off easily, etc. It’s much closer to the feeling in chatting in person.
I just hope Zuck doesn’t continue to make it look unpalatable - that’s why I’m hoping Apple will build a consumer-acceptable solution that will force Meta to get their act together.
It's not just Zuck who makes it unpalatable. It's also the users who have tried a 30 second rollercoaster video on a google cardboard years ago and go like "I tried that virtual reality thing and it was useless". As someone who deploys this in enterprise environments I get this far too much.
I've done some pilots with serious VR meeting software like Arthur and Spatial (before they reinvented themselves as a "generic" metaverse tool). It's not for every call, no. But for the more proactive brainstorming / whiteboard session it's great. Especially as devices start having more sensor for body, face, eye tracking. You really feel like you're with the others. Really great option to replace a long flight you were going to make for a half-day workshop. So much more better than a zoom call. The detractors often point at the poor legless avatars but in my opinion that's something that gets forgotten quickly as you actually start communicating.
It's really hard to actually make people start using it though. And yes Zuck is burning way too much money on the wrong things. After all those billions Horizons still looks worse than VRChat, I mean really, how much did they spend? Can't be more than a few million.
Well if you are in VR you already will lock eyes with whomever you're looking at. Especially if your headset has eye tracking. You will not talk to someone behind you ("Soap opera talking") as it feels just as weird as in real life. Also your hands are mirrored in the virtual world and you can easily flip the bird, clap your hands and more friendly gestures too :)
Or perhaps you mean the boring MS Teams avatars you can use to replace video, they are indeed pretty bored looking all the time and not responding to your voice activity at all but I heard at Ignite that they are getting some upgrades.
What I'm suggesting is that I wouldn't be wearing a headset at all, but everyone else in the meeting wouldn't realize this. My VR self (I'm calling that my avatar) would be on auto-pilot, driven only by my voice and reacting to others voices and virtual positions.
Most of the time it would just need to face whoever is speaking and appear to be engaged, and throw in some random movements, so I don't have to physically do that myself.
I could continue to play guitar or take my dog outside while those with VR headsets on are stuck going through the expected motions.
I always found the audio on phone calls awful. In addition, I cannot see who is on the call, there is no indicator who is speaking, no visual cues who is getting ready to step in. No ability to read the room because you cannot see anyone. It's just awful.
Since one of my friend groups now resides primarily online due to general diaspora, I'd say there are adaptions that make VoIP a lot better. Right off the bat, good quality VoIP calls are vastly better than phone calls, because the compression on phones combined with typically rather shitty audio equipment creates an environment where subtle tonal queues are completely absent. Discord's audio is fantastic, but so is Mumble's, a FOSS VoIP solution, so I have no idea how big companies like Microsoft can't figure it out.
Secondly, there's some etiquette rules that people eventually pick up on: Leave pauses in your speech so that people can butt in, shut up if no one's responded verbally to you in while, and understand that there is an appropriate amount of talking over each other that is acceptable.
> Secondly, there's some etiquette rules that people eventually pick up on: Leave pauses in your speech so that people can butt in, shut up if no one's responded verbally to you in while, and understand that there is an appropriate amount of talking over each other that is acceptable.
Many, many people don’t figure these out in real life.
> Discord's audio is fantastic, but so is Mumble's, a FOSS VoIP solution, so I have no idea how big companies like Microsoft can't figure it out.
Oh Microsoft figured it out. They just made the quality subtly worse vs Zoom. Jumping from a Zoom meeting to a Teams one, especially with the same people, amplifies this a bit.
I wish people liked me enough for this to be like a regular thing I could just, like, drop in on. I hate how regimented it has to be, gotta fucking book anybody like 5 days in advance. :(
Yeah, while I don't love videoconferencing I love the shift to it from audio conference calls. I was never able to stay focused without the visual cues and would wind up drifting off pretty quick.
I enjoyed working at a place that used teamspeak as the tool for conference calls, it showed who's talking. Announced joiners etc. Kept me from needing a long distance plan, kept out of the way, was snappy. It reminded me of my early days playing video games with friends, maybe the nostalgia added to the charm, I'd recommend it!
It really is like missing half the inputs when mirror neurons are not engaged. I mean this in a pop-sci understanding, not sure if its relevant. I do like to watch people's body language, although its the waking equivalent of lucid dreaming in the sense I have to be very deliberate in taking noticeof it to the extent I rely on it more than to tonality and diction.
Two companies Ive worked for since the pandemic have never had video meetings, voice is all you get. One was entirely remote, so id never actually see my coworker’s faces and my current one is still pretty distributed but we meetup occasionally. I like it very much, I feel like one has to be more at-attention on a video call than actual in person meetings.
I'm typically looking at the top half of one person's head, the side of a few other people's, and probably up someone's nose. Any time there's eye contact, it's extremely bizarre/unsettling.
The idea that having cameras on will convey body language like in person conversations seems patently false, partly because of the above and partly because most people moderate their expressions to an extreme while on camera.
At my job we use Teams and very few people ever have their camera on. This situation is perfect for me since a lot of my meetings are relatively irrelevant to what I do. My wife’s work uses the Google video chat equivalent and the majority of her meetings have most people on camera. It just looks so strange to have a wall of people nodding in agreement at whatever the speaker is saying.
> A wall of faces staring at your neck is not what any real in-person thing feels like. A wall of facings looking in your eyes isn’t, either, for that matter, but the constantly-averted-gazes do add even more to the weirdness. You don’t feel so constantly watched in person, unless you’re doing a presentation.
Maybe I just watch wayyy too much CNN, but this has never been weird to me and its fatigues me vastly less than bullshit commuting/travel
Edit: I like how any time normies start having access to rich people shit like Zooming for work, the rich do AnimalPlanet type documentary-style media campaigns about how the lower among us simply can't handle it and it needs to be gently but forecefully brought to a smooth transition until closure or the point at which they can massage through enough pointed legislation/social pressure
I suppose it's good to investigate what exactly is happening, but surely we didn't need to do a scientific study to check if it exists? Have we now advanced empiricism so far that experiencing something yourself is not enough any more?
Anyway, just to make sure I suppose we'd better gather some volunteers to make sure running long distances makes people tired.
Sounds like my regular in-person communication experience. I wonder if this is why I don't notice any difference between zoom and in-person?
A big thing that I like about zoom vs in-person is the knowledge that I can turn the camera and microphone off, and that as soon as I end the call I'll be instantly, blissfully alone.
The problem is most companies seem allergic to working asynchronously. During covid, they moved to Zoom calls but didn't bother changing how they work.
The truth is a modern office is based on hacking fundamental components of humans and their desire for tribal membership and signals + rewards there of. The tricks don't work as well over a zoom call.
I keep my camera on, but turn off my own self view. I read this recommendation on HN here just a couple weeks ago and I now do it all the time. It's less distracting and I feel less self-conscious. It also frees up more of my screen real estate for other faces. Just make sure your camera setup is good at the start of each call before turning off self view!
Cameras should rarely be used. They don't help, they just drastically add to the fatigue. Sound quality needs be kept as high as possible, which means everyone involved needs decent equipment. Comfortable, over-the-ear headsets, with either good built-in microphone arms, or standalone mics. Don't use VoIP providers that can't figure out basic noise reduction or over-compress the audio, and you'll be in a much more tolerable spot.
- Take short breaks throughout the day, like getting coffee/water, etc.
- Turn off self view!
- If you code, try to cluster your meetings together to reduce context switching. Block focus time on your calendar to avoid drive-by meetings that break up these clusters.
- Invest in good headphones and a good mic. Others might have bad sound quality but you definitely won't. Also, it will be easier to hear others even if they have bad sq
>- If you code, try to cluster your meetings together to reduce context switching. Block focus time on your calendar to avoid drive-by meetings that break up these clusters.
If you code, you don't have enough authority to do this.
If you don't have enough authority to do either of these, I'd suggest finding an environment that provides it. Developers are hired to code, not pontificate about coding. Having no control over your "maker time" or control over breaks is burn-out waiting to happen
My guess is our brains are basically incapable of ignoring faces. It's hard coded at such a deep level. So what happens when you are confronted with an ENTIRE WALL of faces? Your circuitry goes crazy trying to map, constantly monitory, interpret them all. This is not how in person meetings work - you look at one person at a time even if you are in a room of 15 people.
Its one reason why I think there could actually be a usefulness to meeting in VR if that ever does become high enough quality and low enough burden for people to want to do it.
I like that Teams added the option to hide your self-view. Even if you don't focus on it, just having a slightly delayed mirror copy of yourself in the corner of the screen is mildly distracting. It feels more natural talking to a group of people that doesn't include yourself.
There is something that I noticed quickly:
The fatigue depend of the quality of the call.
If someone in the call have a lot of background noise, have noisy environement, or a bad microphone, it takes a lot of mental energy to process what they say.
I just sat through a 3 hour french class that got moved onto teams last minute since the instructor is sick. 20 people who can barely communicate in french, unprepared, with crappy laptop microphones... I wanted to jump out the window then entire time.
The biggest thing that leads to this, I think, is bad audio. Listening to shitty scratchy laptop microphones -- or even the comparatively-excellent Apple array microphones -- is deeply fatiguing. I notice a distinct difference in energy expended when I'm on a call with people who have low/zero background noise and decent-quality microphones, and others have noted that about me (as I'm also an audio engineer in my spare time and tend to have pretty good audio and video in teleconferences).
Throwing in probabilistic latency and some occasional distortion and I think the fact that it almost works well enough some or most of the time makes it _worse_: instead of just getting used to a certain base rate of distortion like one might with a walkie-talkie or lossy landline, you end up constantly on edge, uncertain if you're going to fall out of sync and start talking over someone else, asking people to repeat things again and again-- it's punishments on a randomized reward schedule, a slot machine that deals out miscommunication that the communicating parties can't control or mitigate by changing their behavior.
I'm going to lose control and smash my macbook one of these days.
No one should be using built in audio IO on their laptops. A proper headset, with a relatively nice attached mic should be considered minimum viable equipment for VoIP calls, and companies should as such supply them, just like they do laptops.
What’s sad is that the relatively expensive and high end apple Bluetooth headsets also sound awful.
Blame Bluetooth blame whatever, but AirPods Pro and AirPods Max should sound incredible at their price point. And they just don’t. They sound obviously filtered and robotic.
During a job interview I was asked to teach something off the cuff. There were two interviewers in the meeting, so I decided to show the difference that a good mic with good placement can have on call quality. Switched from my nice mic that was one shaka[0] away, to the laptop mic that was about two arm lengths away (maybe 8 shaka’s). They were shocked at the difference and one asked “is that what I sound like right now?”
I went on to discuss how sound intensity is inverse to the square of the distance, so double the mic distance and it’s 1/4 the intensity. So the distant mic was picking up ~1/64th the volume. When there isn’t much of a difference between my voice and room echoes it becomes hard to listen to.
They started a discussion about how much it would cost to outfit everyone with external mics after that haha. For anyone wondering, even a cheap lapel or broadcast mic that’s close to your face will sound much better than a distant laptop, due to the comparative volume of your voice verses the environment.
[0] One shaka, or one “hell yeah” is a unit of measure an audio engineer shared with me once. Extend your thumb and pinky, and get your mic about that far from your mouth for good sound. One or two shaka’s is generally very good.
All you really need is a proper headset with boom mic. Either USB or one with a proprietary dongle because 2-way bluetooth audio sounds terrible. I would think it's pretty common for companies to issue everyone a headset these days.
I wish. I take some amount of pride in having pretty solid video and audio for meetings. I get stuck with people using their awful macbook microphones and webcams, and most don't bother with headphones.
One of the nice upsides of a good microphone is that it can make headphones optional instead of required. I usually take meetings on speakers. But my desk mic is a sE Electronics Dynacaster with tremendous rejection and, coupled with a hardware mute switch and teleconferencing's now-pretty-excellent echo cancellation, nobody can tell.
But I also own IEMs that I use if I'm giving a presentation, so I can get the necessary direct monitoring to ensure I'm on-point with my audio.
You'd be surprised. At work we get some nice-ish jabra headsets and most people wear them.
But I regularly have to take calls with people from other companies, and one in particular comes to mind where some dude never ever wears a proper headset, or doesn't know how to configure it or something [0]. We can always hear the people around him going about their business.
Then there's also the fact that people insist on using bluetooth headsets and wifi, so the audio goes in and out when it doesn't sound like a robot.
---
[0] I've complained once to somebody about being unable to hear them. They said they were wearing a headset, but, as it turned out, Teams was using the laptop's integrated mic instead.
It needs to be a model with a dedicated dongle if you're going wireless. Otherwise for 2 way audio they switch to the Bluetooth phone call profile that hasn't improved for like 20 years.
I use a Sennheiser/EPOS DECT headset. I'd only recommend the Sennheiser ones for DECT because they have an ultra-wideband mode that actually sounds pretty good. Otherwise you're going to sound like a cordless phone.
Watch out, most Jabra headphones with dongles are actually bluetooth as per the specs. Or does the dongle do something regular BT can't do?
This was driving me crazy when I was looking for one a few months ago. Ended going with a wired Poly (the DECT models were absurdly expensive for my needs).
I do have a DECT Jabra model (with a huge base) which is nice enough for conference calls, and the mic doesn't sound noticeably worse than the newer, wired model we have at work. The headphones do have a somewhat tinnier sound, bur for conferencing they're very good as long as nobody with a deep voice breaks out some Shure mic.
The killer feature for me is the very, very low latency. I'm a non-competitive non-hardcore gamer, but I'm happy to use it in FPS games.
It also wipes the floor with bluetooth range-wise. During covid I had it at my parents' thick-walled house and it allowed me to walk around the garden during calls with no interruptions. BT can't handle me going in the next room in my small apartment.
I don't know the technical specifics but I've had a Logitech and Sennheiser BT headset with dongle. I'm pretty sure the dongle is Bluetooth but it is definitely doing something out of spec because there's a huge difference in quality between dongle and direct Bluetooth.
And yea DECT is pretty nice. I also use it for gaming occasionally.
Absolutely. My office is in a basement. The walls are all 5/8" drywall with 3.5" of rockwool inside, plus 6" of rockwool in the rafters above the drop ceiling. And that's before I get to the sound treatment on the actual walls.
People lose their minds when they hear the raw recordings from the vocal booth that's directly behind my work desk. And it was just a closet before, outfitting it just wasn't that expensive.
Unfortunately my present manager loves meetings. The worst part is after we get through the agenda he starts rambling about whatever topic is on his mind, like one of those old people you see at the supermarket who talk to the cashier and who are in obvious need of social interaction. The man doesn't know how to end a meeting.
I know that feeling. When I was managing remote engineers I made a point out of not holding meetings unless strictly necessary. Anything urgent could be raised on chat, and if devs felt the need for a meeting they’d hold it and optionally involve me as well. At some point even dailys were reduced to a morning message about the previous day and the current day.
Until a “scrum master” was brought in and the shit show started. However that role was quickly made redundant and things got back to normal - including productivity which stuttered for a while due to the aforementioned adventure.
In terms of tech we used whatever we felt was relevant. The client was a top 100 corpo, worldwide.
I find it slightly amusing when people confidently think that the only way to produce anything of value is by endless talking and hair splitting. I find that a sign of inexperience - which is fine if it doesnt become a virtue - or worse, i think in some that’s a sign or ladder climbing bullshit.
I know for a fact that if you trust the people you hired for being trustworthy and suitable for the role you will get couple of times more value from their work. And letting them work also tends to get more work done.
Zoom was great when everybody was working from home. Audio quality was never a problem. Everybody on my team are on high end macbook pros and in some cases had personal higher end podcast/streamer equipment. Your not squinting at a TV on the wall 15 feet away when someone is sharing their screen. Everybody was far more prompt for meetings since they where not physically changing locations or waiting for the people who had the conference room before them to vacate.
Its the hybrid mix that I can't stand. I remained a remote employee when everyone else was forced back into the office. Now I have no idea who is talking or who is in the room half the time. The AV setups in the conference rooms pick up any background conversations and amplify them. The cameras randomly are zooming in and out at the wrong person. Nobody is ever on time to the meetings anymore because they have to move between physical locations. There tends to be a conversation in progress when the conference room finally joins the call.
While attending longer video conferences where I don't have to speak I just put my headset on and do something housework, like vacuuming the floors and some food prepping.
For those I have/want to talk, I feel that most difficult part is that it's hard to get into the conversation if it's hybrid, people attenuating in a meeting can easily use facial expression and/or body languages to indicate they want to interrupt or add something in it, while for us on the big screen, some of the people couldn't read the cue, unless someone virtually "raised a hand" with a binging sound.
My best experience with the meetings are the smaller ones that everyone has the camera on, speak in turn, giving feedback by using "raise a hand" button in a row, and don't take details offline. (around 60% of hour meetings are in this way - weekly).
One upside about larger video calls is that you can read participants expression without them realizing.
So you spend all afternoon in Zoom meetings, let's say back to back for 4 hours? How does that differ from in-person meetings? You're exhausted in either scenario.
For me personally it's information deficit and context dissonance that fatigues me.
When I am in a meeting room I see all the faces, I can tell what everyone is looking at and read their emotions from their movements etc. It's all subconscious though so I am not distracted by this process. I also know when I am not being looked at, and can relax some of my own social cues.
In an online meeting, I get none of that so I am working a bit harder to piece everyones contributions to the meeting together. I also have the dissonance of context, I am in a meeting here but also on my computer and in my house. You get good at it but you are fighting off distractions regardless.
Meetings are a pain regardless but I do find them less tiring in person.
It's so difficult to intervene at just the right time.
When you're in person, you can just immediately start talking after whoever was talking stops. There are rarely conflicts about two people starting talking at the same time. The nonverbal cues also help everyone see who'll be responding.
In Zoom, you start as soon as your audio and video feed tells you to, but by then someone else has started talking, which leads to the infamous "sorry, go ahead" ritual. It's annoying. The more people there are, the worse it is.
I dunno, my baseline is I've worked on global teams for 90% of my career going back nearly 2 decades at this point. Zoom is better than phone, and I was never going to be in the same office as these people anyway..
So is live meeting fatigue. Recently I had to spend a few days in the office (I work remotely, so thankfully it's at most 10 days a year) and I must say I never felt so tired while working from home or having even long calls over Zoom.
What I am trying to say is that probably fatigue comes from getting disengaged. If you're participating and you find meaning in what you're doing, it doesn't really matter over what medium it's done. But sure, if you have to stare at your screen while knowing that you're being broadcast to your colleagues and the call is irrelevant to you, of course you will feel tired. In the office meeting room you can at least pretend you are doing some important stuff while scrolling at your laptop or phone.
Organizations should embrace asynchronous communication and whatever meetings need to be done, it should be ensured that only relevant parties are participating.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadhttps://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/a-theory-of-zoom-...
I'm also curios if this will at all be relatable to how introverts find in person communication tiring. Maybe that same stress is at work there but from the start, without the need for the differences introduce by zoom. It will be interesting to see how the research on this plays out.
A wall of faces staring at your neck is not what any real in-person thing feels like. A wall of facings looking in your eyes isn’t, either, for that matter, but the constantly-averted-gazes do add even more to the weirdness. You don’t feel so constantly watched in person, unless you’re doing a presentation.
I did a little work with one of the Big 3 management consulting firms about… oh, four or five years back, well after everyone cool and most non-cool had adopted Zoom or some other video chat for work calls. They favored actual dial-in conference calls. At first I thought they were dinosaurs, but the more I considered it the more I thought they had the right idea. Nothing to download or permissions to allow. Doesn’t tie up your laptop. Don’t need a laptop out at all, in fact. Phone number and code digits are all you need, can record that on a napkin.
Mass video chat’s so weird that I’m not sure the video’s adding value anyway, if you’re not screen sharing.
Personally I go in the office 1-2 days a week. If you want to talk to me, do it in person those days. If you add me to some 10 person video call. I’m just going to zone out.
Requiring video on probably makes people push back against being invited to useless meetings rather than seeing it as an hour to clean the house.
Exactly. But most of the time you don't have a choice.
So may as well do dishes.
There is no point in pushing back in this case. They just don't care about running an effective meeting.
Wow all this time like a sucker I've been doing what my boss asked me to do.
This includes whether to attend a meeting, hours that you work, and other things that you might currently conceive of as obligations.
At the end of the day your boss only cares about looking good to their boss. If you can help them do that anything else is just a detail
So really, the options are typically 1) deal with it 2) quit.
They genuinely believe that whatever they're crapping on about to a brick wall for 2 hours straight is the most important thing in the universe and they want your undivided attention, productivity or profit be damned. That's why they force people to turn their cameras on.
Many of the people for whom the meeting is pointless are usually in no position to push back on it.
If in person, just zone out. If on Zoom and allowed, turn off camera and vacuum the carpet.
A multi-call system like a Discord server represents a small step, with the ability to see that conversations are happening in other calls, and maybe get a guess of what they're doing thanks to live presence, but it's far from a complete solution.
It's a two way street. A lot of people are terrible at writing to communicate, especially in a time-sensitive context like Slack, and we remote workers are having to do a lot more written communication than when we were in the office.
US national reading comprehension test scores have been flat, more or less, since 1992. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/reading/2022/
There seems to be a disconnect between parts of this sentence. "Can't understend written content" because they "interpret things literally."
Why wouldn't they? If you have something to say, say it - or, in this case, write it.
Why leave things open to interpretation?
Furthermore, why not just say things literally in a video call or in-person meeting as well? Surely the only possibility is for less confusion this way.
When you have a verbal communication people bring up things they don't understand in realtime and you correct as you go so that, by the end of the conversation, a mutual understanding has been reached.
In writing - especially if you're sending emails - people are often reluctant to come back for more info as they think it'll make them look dumb, plus there's the 'inertia' factor plus the factor of not knowing whether you'll get a timely reply.
It's just so hard to convince others before them having tried it. You can't tell someone what the matrix is, you have to see it for yourself.
I just hope Zuck doesn’t continue to make it look unpalatable - that’s why I’m hoping Apple will build a consumer-acceptable solution that will force Meta to get their act together.
I've done some pilots with serious VR meeting software like Arthur and Spatial (before they reinvented themselves as a "generic" metaverse tool). It's not for every call, no. But for the more proactive brainstorming / whiteboard session it's great. Especially as devices start having more sensor for body, face, eye tracking. You really feel like you're with the others. Really great option to replace a long flight you were going to make for a half-day workshop. So much more better than a zoom call. The detractors often point at the poor legless avatars but in my opinion that's something that gets forgotten quickly as you actually start communicating.
It's really hard to actually make people start using it though. And yes Zuck is burning way too much money on the wrong things. After all those billions Horizons still looks worse than VRChat, I mean really, how much did they spend? Can't be more than a few million.
I hope there will be a way to convert voice into a realistic behaving VR avatar, no equipment needed other than a mic.
For example if I say "ok John, I like that idea", my avatar automatically faces John and locks eyes.
For most of the meeting I'm not speaking anyway so my avatar could just look at whoever is speaking and look interested.
Or perhaps you mean the boring MS Teams avatars you can use to replace video, they are indeed pretty bored looking all the time and not responding to your voice activity at all but I heard at Ignite that they are getting some upgrades.
What I'm suggesting is that I wouldn't be wearing a headset at all, but everyone else in the meeting wouldn't realize this. My VR self (I'm calling that my avatar) would be on auto-pilot, driven only by my voice and reacting to others voices and virtual positions.
Most of the time it would just need to face whoever is speaking and appear to be engaged, and throw in some random movements, so I don't have to physically do that myself.
I could continue to play guitar or take my dog outside while those with VR headsets on are stuck going through the expected motions.
And they will notice anyway. A real avatar with full body tracking is quite emotive.
Secondly, there's some etiquette rules that people eventually pick up on: Leave pauses in your speech so that people can butt in, shut up if no one's responded verbally to you in while, and understand that there is an appropriate amount of talking over each other that is acceptable.
Many, many people don’t figure these out in real life.
Oh Microsoft figured it out. They just made the quality subtly worse vs Zoom. Jumping from a Zoom meeting to a Teams one, especially with the same people, amplifies this a bit.
The idea that having cameras on will convey body language like in person conversations seems patently false, partly because of the above and partly because most people moderate their expressions to an extreme while on camera.
Maybe I just watch wayyy too much CNN, but this has never been weird to me and its fatigues me vastly less than bullshit commuting/travel
Edit: I like how any time normies start having access to rich people shit like Zooming for work, the rich do AnimalPlanet type documentary-style media campaigns about how the lower among us simply can't handle it and it needs to be gently but forecefully brought to a smooth transition until closure or the point at which they can massage through enough pointed legislation/social pressure
Anyway, just to make sure I suppose we'd better gather some volunteers to make sure running long distances makes people tired.
B: Do you have a peer reviewed study about it?
A big thing that I like about zoom vs in-person is the knowledge that I can turn the camera and microphone off, and that as soon as I end the call I'll be instantly, blissfully alone.
- Take short breaks throughout the day, like getting coffee/water, etc.
- Turn off self view!
- If you code, try to cluster your meetings together to reduce context switching. Block focus time on your calendar to avoid drive-by meetings that break up these clusters.
- Invest in good headphones and a good mic. Others might have bad sound quality but you definitely won't. Also, it will be easier to hear others even if they have bad sq
Your status goes yellow and you're fired.
>- If you code, try to cluster your meetings together to reduce context switching. Block focus time on your calendar to avoid drive-by meetings that break up these clusters.
If you code, you don't have enough authority to do this.
Turn your self video off.
Its one reason why I think there could actually be a usefulness to meeting in VR if that ever does become high enough quality and low enough burden for people to want to do it.
Not in any sort of vain way (at least I don’t think??), but something about seeing myself makes me look.
I'm going to lose control and smash my macbook one of these days.
Blame Bluetooth blame whatever, but AirPods Pro and AirPods Max should sound incredible at their price point. And they just don’t. They sound obviously filtered and robotic.
And also the latency they add is a problem.
I went on to discuss how sound intensity is inverse to the square of the distance, so double the mic distance and it’s 1/4 the intensity. So the distant mic was picking up ~1/64th the volume. When there isn’t much of a difference between my voice and room echoes it becomes hard to listen to.
They started a discussion about how much it would cost to outfit everyone with external mics after that haha. For anyone wondering, even a cheap lapel or broadcast mic that’s close to your face will sound much better than a distant laptop, due to the comparative volume of your voice verses the environment.
[0] One shaka, or one “hell yeah” is a unit of measure an audio engineer shared with me once. Extend your thumb and pinky, and get your mic about that far from your mouth for good sound. One or two shaka’s is generally very good.
Then they wonder why everyone hates meetings.
But I also own IEMs that I use if I'm giving a presentation, so I can get the necessary direct monitoring to ensure I'm on-point with my audio.
But I regularly have to take calls with people from other companies, and one in particular comes to mind where some dude never ever wears a proper headset, or doesn't know how to configure it or something [0]. We can always hear the people around him going about their business.
Then there's also the fact that people insist on using bluetooth headsets and wifi, so the audio goes in and out when it doesn't sound like a robot.
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[0] I've complained once to somebody about being unable to hear them. They said they were wearing a headset, but, as it turned out, Teams was using the laptop's integrated mic instead.
I use a Sennheiser/EPOS DECT headset. I'd only recommend the Sennheiser ones for DECT because they have an ultra-wideband mode that actually sounds pretty good. Otherwise you're going to sound like a cordless phone.
This was driving me crazy when I was looking for one a few months ago. Ended going with a wired Poly (the DECT models were absurdly expensive for my needs).
I do have a DECT Jabra model (with a huge base) which is nice enough for conference calls, and the mic doesn't sound noticeably worse than the newer, wired model we have at work. The headphones do have a somewhat tinnier sound, bur for conferencing they're very good as long as nobody with a deep voice breaks out some Shure mic.
The killer feature for me is the very, very low latency. I'm a non-competitive non-hardcore gamer, but I'm happy to use it in FPS games.
It also wipes the floor with bluetooth range-wise. During covid I had it at my parents' thick-walled house and it allowed me to walk around the garden during calls with no interruptions. BT can't handle me going in the next room in my small apartment.
And yea DECT is pretty nice. I also use it for gaming occasionally.
People lose their minds when they hear the raw recordings from the vocal booth that's directly behind my work desk. And it was just a closet before, outfitting it just wasn't that expensive.
Until a “scrum master” was brought in and the shit show started. However that role was quickly made redundant and things got back to normal - including productivity which stuttered for a while due to the aforementioned adventure.
In terms of tech we used whatever we felt was relevant. The client was a top 100 corpo, worldwide.
I find it slightly amusing when people confidently think that the only way to produce anything of value is by endless talking and hair splitting. I find that a sign of inexperience - which is fine if it doesnt become a virtue - or worse, i think in some that’s a sign or ladder climbing bullshit.
I know for a fact that if you trust the people you hired for being trustworthy and suitable for the role you will get couple of times more value from their work. And letting them work also tends to get more work done.
Its the hybrid mix that I can't stand. I remained a remote employee when everyone else was forced back into the office. Now I have no idea who is talking or who is in the room half the time. The AV setups in the conference rooms pick up any background conversations and amplify them. The cameras randomly are zooming in and out at the wrong person. Nobody is ever on time to the meetings anymore because they have to move between physical locations. There tends to be a conversation in progress when the conference room finally joins the call.
For those I have/want to talk, I feel that most difficult part is that it's hard to get into the conversation if it's hybrid, people attenuating in a meeting can easily use facial expression and/or body languages to indicate they want to interrupt or add something in it, while for us on the big screen, some of the people couldn't read the cue, unless someone virtually "raised a hand" with a binging sound.
My best experience with the meetings are the smaller ones that everyone has the camera on, speak in turn, giving feedback by using "raise a hand" button in a row, and don't take details offline. (around 60% of hour meetings are in this way - weekly).
One upside about larger video calls is that you can read participants expression without them realizing.
When I am in a meeting room I see all the faces, I can tell what everyone is looking at and read their emotions from their movements etc. It's all subconscious though so I am not distracted by this process. I also know when I am not being looked at, and can relax some of my own social cues.
In an online meeting, I get none of that so I am working a bit harder to piece everyones contributions to the meeting together. I also have the dissonance of context, I am in a meeting here but also on my computer and in my house. You get good at it but you are fighting off distractions regardless.
Meetings are a pain regardless but I do find them less tiring in person.
That sucks
it’s constantly making our brains annoyed.
When you're in person, you can just immediately start talking after whoever was talking stops. There are rarely conflicts about two people starting talking at the same time. The nonverbal cues also help everyone see who'll be responding.
In Zoom, you start as soon as your audio and video feed tells you to, but by then someone else has started talking, which leads to the infamous "sorry, go ahead" ritual. It's annoying. The more people there are, the worse it is.
What I am trying to say is that probably fatigue comes from getting disengaged. If you're participating and you find meaning in what you're doing, it doesn't really matter over what medium it's done. But sure, if you have to stare at your screen while knowing that you're being broadcast to your colleagues and the call is irrelevant to you, of course you will feel tired. In the office meeting room you can at least pretend you are doing some important stuff while scrolling at your laptop or phone.
Organizations should embrace asynchronous communication and whatever meetings need to be done, it should be ensured that only relevant parties are participating.