Take steps to avoid ‘Zoom fatigue’

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/ban.31192
• Date: 01 December 2020
• Published date: 01 December 2020

8 Board & Administrator

DOI 10.1002/ban © 2020 Wiley Periodicals LLC • All rights reserved

Take steps to avoid ‘Zoom fatigue’

With the COVID-19 pandemic seeing a new surge

across the country, health experts expect that

social distancing and limits on group gatherings

will continue for the foreseeable future. What that

means for nonprofit boards, among other things, is

that board meetings will continue to be virtual.

However, the way that people interact on group

meeting platforms differs from how they interact

in person, experts say—in fact, virtual meetings

could very well be more taxing on them, and could

lead to what some are calling “Zoom fatigue.”

According to Barbra Kavanaugh of Brighter

Strategies, an organizational development and

change management consultancy, attending the

board meeting is likely not the only thing your

board members have done online that day.

“Happy hours, doctor visits and even family

dinners—almost every kind of personal interaction

is now happening on video,” Kavanaugh explains

in a blog post in this topic. “This means that your

board meeting might be the third, fourth, even

sixth on-line meeting in each board member’s

day—and they are tired.”

Making things worse, she says, are some of the

key ways in which virtual meetings differ from in-

person meetings. For example:

• We typically don’t look at someone’s face the

whole time they are talking to us in person—we

may look around the room or make eye contact

with other participants, for example. But in a

virtual meeting, we tend to focus intently on the

person speaking, even though there is no real eye

contact or feedback between speaker and listener.

• We can adjust our seating or standing posi-

tion or even walk away while listening to someone

speak, Kavanaugh said, but in virtual meetings,

we tend to stay put so that our webcams are fixed

on us for other participants to see.

• In a typical meeting, we sometimes have side

conversations with people nearby to catch up or

clarify a point under discussion. But in a virtual

meeting, this isn’t easily done, and if there’s more

than one person speaking at a time, it’s difficult

to make out what each person is saying.

According to Kavanaugh, nonprofits looking to

avoid “Zoom fatigue” should carefully consider

whether every meeting needs to be on a virtual

platform. For example, some committee or plan-

ning meetings may be done on conference calls,

she said, and boards can check consensus by

email or using survey applications. Further, you

can use chat apps to provide an easy and informal

place for board members to ask questions or share

ideas with other members.

For more information, visit https://www.

brighterstrategies.com. ■

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