Zoom fatigue: How to avoid excessive meetings in remote work
Have you ever spent the entire working day juggling from one meeting to another? You will agree with us that the experience is never enjoyable. The frustration caused by excessive meetings can disrupt workers’ concentration on the task at hand, thus reducing their overall productivity. Therefore, the team managers need to understand why specific meetings do not even need to happen in the first place. Several workers have reported that many meetings are often pointless without a substantial agenda.
The best bet to reduce excessive meetings in remote work is to embrace several forms of asynchronous communication, including emails and voice recordings. Adopting asynchronous communication can help the team members concentrate more on their jobs without hopping on incessant meetings.
This post will discuss some of the meetings that can be handled using asynchronous communication channels. They include the following:
1. Brief updates on ongoing projects
While getting task updates on ongoing projects can be beneficial to the entire team, they can become a big distraction when workers have to suspend their tasks to attend short update meetings repeatedly. However, the most time-efficient way to get such updates is through asynchronous communications like sending emails or sending chats through the official team communication app. This way, the team members and project managers can respond at their most convenient times without interrupting their workflow or being pressured to send their replies in real-time.
2. Feedback
Project managers often schedule meetings to discuss their feedback on the jobs delivered by their team members. While feedback is an integral part of the management process, there could be several other ways to give this feedback without requiring a real-time meeting. For example, there are times when feedback needs a synchronous (real-time) discussion. But, some minor feedback can be given easily by sending emails to the team members. You can also provide feedback using the commenting section on your documents. Giving feedback this way will help the team members clearly read and understand the feedback without wasting their time on real-time meetings.
3. Non-participatory meetings
Not all meetings require the active participation of the team members. For example, some informative meetings, like knowledge sharing sections, may need only the speaker to share his knowledge on a particular topic. In such cases, it might be essential to conduct the knowledge-sharing sessions through audio recordings that team members can listen to at their most convenient time, without concentrating in real-time.
However, if the meeting requires the active contribution of just a select few members, it would be better to invite only a few people instead of dragging the entire team into the meeting.
Conclusion
While meetings are essential meeting points in the remote work environment, they can become counter-productive when these meetings begin to eat into the team’s working hours. Your best bet is to try out several forms of asynchronous communication and determine what works best for you and your team members.
