Online meetings are not more exhausting than face-to-face meetings, according to a recent study by Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz that challenges widely held beliefs about video conferencing.
Junior Professor Hadar Nesher Shoshan of JGU and Assistant Professor Wilken Wehrt from Maastricht University investigated how exhausting online meetings are in comparison with other forms of meeting. They asked 125 subjects to report over 10 days on whether they had taken part in a meeting, whether that meeting was online or face-to-face, whether they were dealing with other things during the meeting, if there had been the opportunity to take a break, and how exhausted the meeting had made them feel.
The researchers collected information on 945 meetings, of which 62 per cent were video meetings. They found no evidence of the Zoom fatigue phenomenon. In fact, video meetings shorter than 44 minutes are actually less exhausting than other meetings.
“Our initial hypothesis was that Zoom fatigue still existed. After all, all previous studies had come to this conclusion, so there was no reason to doubt that this result was correct,” adds Nesher Shoshan. “However, we found no evidence of the phenomenon! According to our findings, online meetings are not more fatiguing than in-person meetings.”
The discrepancy in results between the new and former studies exists because the current study uses data collected recently, while other studies employed data collated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Nesher Shoshan postulates that the cause of Zoom fatigue was the pandemic situation itself, rather than the online meeting conditions, with all the negative aspects associated with lockdown projected onto Zoom meetings.
The findings have important practical implications with regard to the working world, particularly when it comes to the assumed disadvantages of working from home. The results have been published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology.
