The fatiguing effects of camera use in virtual meetings

The fatigue comes in several forms: physical, experiential, psychological.

Physical as in the act of being seating in poor posture, for long hours at a time and how this makes us feel.

Experiential as in the act of seeing someone on a laptop screen as we are hunched over, they are dithered and the lighting is poor and they sound (their mic + my laptop speakers) muddied and unreal.

Psychological as trust, empathy, rapport is founded on presence and connectivity, being able to communicate using gestures, body language, expressions... and how these are all muted or eradicated by the above two.

It is addressable but it doesn't come for free.

The article tested camera on vs camera off, but not the quality of the experience offered by camera on. Similarly the quality of the experience offered by the audio feels to be even more important than that of the video. To continue their experiment to an extreme... meetings where both the video and audio off wouldn't be fatiguing at all :D

To address my experiential side I started with a good microphone, then a better camera, then better (more neutral) speakers. Lighting and positioning of the desk to improve my health as well as how natural I look. For the physical a sit stand desk that I actually do use multiple times per day, and some Birkenstocks help too - I stand for about 1/3 of meetings, and I always keep a bottle of water on the desk.

I'm in an engineering leadership role and it's not unusual for me to do 6+ hours of meetings in any given day.

At the start of the pandemic I had a lot of exhaustion from such meetings, but where I am now having overhauled my setup and my thinking about it is very different and I find that I really do feel connected and restored through seeing people (I'm more an introvert, and this form now feels like being an extrovert... it's a form of meeting people that I can do).

As with anything, seek to understand the fatigue, seek to see how you can overcome it. It doesn't need a big shopping spree, I tweaked one thing every month or two until it all fell into place.

But I do agree that turning on camera constantly is tiring thing. I thought turning off the camera in the meeting can be considered rude but now I've changed my mind. I wish there were a middle ground for having a language cue in the conversation while the camera is off.

I also don't find cameras necessary, but me and some other people I know find that long 1-1 meetings with the camera turned off feels like a prolonged phone call, which is extremely tiring for people who also dislike long phone calls.

Short camera-less meetings with quick, focused, telephone-like discussions are perfectly fine, of course. But if one of the parties has to keep going into a computer type a bunch of stuff in-between all the time, it suddenly feels like I'm trying to cancel my cable or newspaper subscription.

It's better to have notes and do it later, or at lest share the screen, rather than only using 5 minutes out of 30 for actual talking.

I found that some people who use Discord audio chats are used to having calls like that, but I'd check with the other person if they're ok before.

Interviews, granted, getting to know a person it’s good to see a face.

For most meetings a voice call is sufficient, for those meetings where a voice call is not sufficient you probably want an in-person meeting with a whiteboard anyway

Some people failed to notice, but for those who did it was a bit like uncanny valley.