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Harmony & Mobility Consulting: How to fight Zoom Fatigue?
Aude BENETON and Helene BERTONECHE share with you concrete recommendations to prepare for the current transition period towards 2021.
Harmony & Mobility Consulting celebrates 10 years of activity in Singapore!
For this occasion, and until the end of the year, Aude BENETON and Helene BERTONECHE share with you concrete recommendations to prepare for the current transition period towards 2021.
In September, find their advice about the new but unfortunately too well known phenomenon of Zoom Fatigue.
You were already used to the meeting marathon. With the Covid-19 situation, you have now fully entered the era of video-calls. However, this new way is emotionally draining. It comes from a combination of factors that require more mental process than face to face interactions.
At Harmony & Mobility Consulting, we have selected here a few tips to help you keep running the video call marathon, and hopefully adopt new habits that you will keep forever:
Firstly, we encourage you to cut down on video-calls:
a. Organise your agenda differently
- Implement time boxing with some ‘NO MEETING’ or ‘FOCUS TIME’ blocks
- Launch a weekly ‘Meeting-Free day’
- Refuse calls if you feel you do not have any added value
- Use collaboration clouds or project management tools
b. Consider alternative ways to communicate
- Replace calls with recorded messages or asynchronous videos
- Come back to emails and/or chats
- Don’t forget about the telephone!
Secondly, make video-calls more bearable and comfortable:
a. Again, organisation and structure will be your allies
- Always have an objective for your meeting (information? Decision? Brainstorming?) and a clear agenda with a meeting itinerary
- Involve participants from the start (eg. ice breakers, introductions, temperature check)
- Adopt efficient meeting management with meeting leader and/or moderator, time keeper for each video-call. It is a good way to get people involved in the meeting despite the distance
- Run shorter meetings of 25min or 50min
- And pause. Take active breaks. And stick to it! Don’t look at your phone and move, breathe, step out for a while
b. Make sure the video-call tool is at your service and not the opposite
- Turn off your camera or hide self-view (a post-it will do too!). Decide when there is an added value of having the camera on or off
- Forget about multi-tasking: close tabs, disable email and chat notifications
c. Think about your environment
- Separate your work space from your personal space. If you don't have a separate room to transform into an office, be creative. A screen will do.
- Change your typical set-up to feel refreshed
With remote collaboration and online tools, we should be able to develop new skills to manage our meetings in a more efficient and collaborative way. Indeed, online tools give us the opportunity to involve key people in our discussions. Do not miss the chance to get diverse perspectives. But adapt your ways of working to make sure to benefit from these new opportunities.
Find out more about Harmony & Mobility Consulting
This article was written in remote collaboration with Aude BENETON, Helene Bertoneche and Christine Etcheparre
Contact us if you want to know more about how we can help you to adjust your ways of working with the new Covid19 context
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http://www.harmonymobility.com
Photo credit: https://unsplash.com/@magnetme
