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How to Bring a Little Joy to Zoom
Four months into the pandemic here in the US means four months since much of the workforce has gone from zero to hero on Zoom or some equivalent video software. Pre-pandemic, only 5% of the workforce used video conferencing regularly for meetings; now, it’s everybody.
How’s it working out for most employees? In a word, dismally. Most people report Zoom fatigue, high levels of stress and loneliness, and low levels of job satisfaction. It brings me no satisfaction at all to note that it’s what I predicted in Can You Hear Me? How to Connect with People in a Virtual World in 2018.
Why is there so little joy in Zoomland? Complaints about the workplace and the commute have been around as long as workplaces and commutes, so why aren’t more people happy to forgo getting there and work from home? Three reasons primarily. First of all, there’s the stress of the pandemic itself. The fear of death and the indeterminacy of the sentence hang over us all . Second, there’s the stress of having to play the multiple roles simultaneously that we used to play seriatim: worker, maybe executive, wife/husband/significant other, mother/father, caregiver, and so on down the list. Third, of course we miss our fellow humans.
Finally, there’s the difficulty of using the software effectively itself. That’s what I’m going to focus on here. Video conferencing is…
