Preventing Meeting Fatigue by Screen Recording

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Keeping your workers enthusiastic and guarding against fatigue should be among your top priorities as a manager or business owner. Unfortunately, one of the most common sources of fatigue among employees is linked to one of the most common workplace events: meetings.

Zoom meetings haven’t helped with this issue. On the contrary, there’s reason to believe that being on camera results in greater levels of meeting fatigue for workers than ever before.

Luckily, this is a problem with a solution. Often, it may be possible to avoid meetings (particularly those of the virtual kind) through screen recording.

What is Meeting Fatigue?

Meeting fatigue refers to the exhaustion and burnout employees may experience as a result of attending excessively frequent meetings. Employees may be particularly like to struggle with meeting fatigue if they have reason to believe a significant number of the meetings they are required to participate in are unproductive, inefficient, or unnecessary.

Don’t underestimate the potential consequences of this problem! Meeting fatigue may cause employees to feel overwhelmed and drained of energy. This, in turn, could lead to decreased motivation and engagement.

How Virtual Meeting Fatigue Adds to the Problem

The shift to remote work and the widespread adoption of video conferencing tools like Zoom has certainly contributed to the rise of meeting fatigue. For many employees across a range of industries, virtual meetings have replaced in-person interactions, resulting in a significant increase in the number and length of meetings. This has yielded a new problem: virtual meeting fatigue or Zoom fatigue.

There’s also reason to believe virtual meetings can be even more stressful and exhausting than traditional in-person meetings. This may be due to such factors as:

Technical difficulties
Lack of nonverbal cues
The need to remain focused on a screen for extended periods of time
Constantly seeing one’s own face during video calls has been shown to cause psychological stress

Additionally, for those who have not returned to a physical workplace, remote work has blurred the line between work and personal time, making it difficult to set boundaries and leading to increased feelings of burnout and exhaustion. While video conferencing tools like Zoom have enabled businesses to continue functioning during the pandemic, they have also highlighted the need for more intentional and effective communication practices to prevent meeting fatigue and support employee well-being.

How to Combat Virtual Meeting Fatigue: The Role of Screen Recording

One way to avoid Zoom fatigue (and to guard against meeting fatigue in general) is to simply require employees to participate in fewer meetings. However, you need to strike a delicate balance. You don’t want to overwhelm employees with too many meetings, but you also don’t want to adopt a no-meeting policy if doing so prevents you from sharing important information with your workers.

Luckily, there are almost certainly instances when you can share that type of information without requiring either face-to-face meetings or Zoom meetings.

Powtoon Capture is a screen recording tool that allows you to record your screen, webcam or both. This tool also lets you add such features as:

Logos
Branded characters
Various other visual elements

There are many circumstances in which sharing a video recording of your screen or webcam in a message could be preferable to scheduling more remote meetings. If you’re wondering how to reduce meeting fatigue when videoconferencing is becoming increasingly commonplace in the post-pandemic era, consider the following potential examples:

Demonstrating New Tools

Recording your screen when using a new tool that other team members will also need to learn to use is an effective way to teach your employees how to navigate a new app or platform without having to host meetings. This solution could minimize the amount of time it takes for employees to become familiar with new tools while maximizing their productivity.

Onboarding New Clients and Employees

To some degree, scheduling face-to-face conferences or online meetings when onboarding new clients or employees is important. New employees should have the opportunity to meet their coworkers in a formal setting, and new clients should be shown that you care enough about their experience to at the very least schedule video meetings during which you can address their initial questions and introduce them to your company.

Sharing Information With Employees in Different Time Zones

The rise of remote work has yielded a similar trend in some companies: allowing employees to work not only where they please, but when they please. As long as employees know what their responsibilities are and complete their work in a timely manner, they don’t all have to work the same hours.

This trend allows organizations to expand their hiring pools by hiring employees across time zones. The trade-off is that it can be difficult to schedule meetings when employees live in different parts of the globe and are thus active at different times of the day. Fortunately, screen recording may frequently offer an alternative to participating in meetings.

Get Started With Powtoon Capture

These are just a few ways in which Powtoon Capture, one of Powtoon’s free tools, can help you combat meeting fatigue. The more you experiment with the tool, the more uses you may find for it.

It’s also worth noting that video content in general can play many roles in your business. Along with facilitating internal communications, video content can help you market your products and services, attract new job candidates, and more.

Powtoon also makes generating quality video content easy, even if you have a relatively modest video production budget (and little video production experience to speak of). Sign up for free today to get started!

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Hanna Abitbul

Hanna is Powtoon's Content Marketing Strategist. She joined Powtoon as a copywriter in 2019, after graduating from university with a specialized degree in marketing and business. She continues to inspire people to create incredible video content with blog posts, videos, guides, and more. Hanna's passions include reading, singing, and caring for animals (#proudvegan). Nothing makes her happier than waking up to her two black kitties who, contrary to popular belief, are good luck!