Sick of constant video calls in the era of remote work? Institute guidelines or limits on how many video calls you can be required to do in a day or week.
Claire is an organizer and designer based in Chicago. In the past year and a half she's worked on a mayoral, congressional and presidential race where she helped unionize a top-tier presidential campaign. She believes collective action leads to more informed citizens and a healthier society.
Through COVID, the strain of maintaining a virtual workplace has taken a toll on all of us. Without any precedent to a sudden shift to working remotely, we’ve all had to embrace routine video conferencing to maintain work connections. However, the hours we currently spend video conferencing are out of control, with many of our colleagues spending consecutive back-to-back meetings in video conferences. This is unsustainable and taxing and frankly amounts to more “facetime” than our pre-COVID work practices. Sitting at a computer all day staring at a computer screen is detrimental to our health. Many of us find we have neck pains, stiff limbs, or don’t have sufficient opportunities to stretch or use the bathroom between meetings.. We should put thoughtful limitations on these meetings to preserve our energy and productivity.
COVID working conditions popularized the well-known “Zoom fatigue” where employees on video conferences are physically immobilized to stay on camera in view of other participants. The added strain of staying so visually alert makes meetings more tiring. In order to regain a sense of normalcy in our remote-work environment, we are proposing that [Company] introduce video call limits company-wide.