As my friend Alfred Poor (he’s my video meeting advisor and founder of The 75% Solution), told me, “I firmly believe that there is no such thing as ‘Zoom Fatigue.’ Instead, I believe that people are observing ‘Bad Zoom Fatigue,’ which is not much different from ‘Bad Conference Room Meeting Fatigue’ that we’ve suffered from for generations. It’s just that the vast majority of Zoom (and Teams and Google Meet and webinars and all those other platforms) meetings are not prepared and executed with intention.”
Specifically, Poor believes you must properly organize “the meeting itself — ‘this meeting could have been an email’ — which requires analyzing the objectives along with the type and direction of information flow required to achieve those objectives.”
For example, if a meeting involves the boss simply telling people what’s what in the next quarter, it could just as well be a webinar rather than a videoconference. Or, if there’s a meeting to determine what will happen in the next quarter, it should involve only the people planning what’s what, not everyone and their assistant. Your aides-de-camp will be fine with meeting minutes and action items.
Yes, sometimes videoconferences are necessary and helpful. Yes, AI tools can make them more productive. And, yes, I, for one, would be happy to have a meeting where I was represented by an avatar of my dog Telly and my editor by his Lil Joe. That would be fun, at least once. But for videoconferences to really be useful, we need organization and planning, not technical tricks.
