Episode Details

Video conferencing has rapidly increased in popularity, but the cognitive and attentional load can make it exhausting. In this week's Leadership Today podcast we look at five ways to stop Zoom killing your focus.

Hello and welcome to episode 92 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we tackle one of today's biggest leadership challenges. This week we look at five ways to stop Zoom killing your focus.

Zoom and other video conferencing services have seen a rapid rise in popularity. People have flocked to video conferencing as the next best thing to a face-to-face meeting, particularly when trying to build social connection. During a global pandemic, video conferencing has proven to be a lifesaver for many people forced to work from home. It's a testament to the quality of Zoom that the brand name is now synonymous with web-based video conferencing. We are becoming increasingly dependent on access to Zoom, as evidenced by a recent outage that disrupted millions of people including online schooling and businesses.

And Zoom isn't just a back up for when we can't be face-to-face. Research conducted last year showed Zoom was rated positively for qualitative data collection in health care interviews, coming in ahead of face-to-face, phone and other video conferencing options when they factored efficiency into the equation.

Amidst all of that success and celebration there are recurring and largely anecdotal concerns emerging about the impact of video conferencing on our attention and energy levels. People report feeling drained and exhausted at the end of a full day of Zoom calls. It's too early for there to be specific research about why this might be the case, but the field of attention research gives us some clues to why Zoom is killing our ability to focus.

Let's face it, weird things happen on Zoom calls that would never happen in a 'real' meeting. We see people fixing their hair as they stare at themselves. People keep looking away from the camera to a second screen so you end up having a conversation with their ear. People eating anything looks disgusting - seriously, stop eating while using Zoom. We see people talking but no words are coming out - you're on mute! Surprise people and their pets appear out of nowhere. People keep trying to talk at the same time which leads to a flurry of "no, no, you go first". As we look behind people it feels like we are in a dozen different rooms at once. And, while we're talking backgrounds, why not include an even more distracting virtual background? Sure, you're on a beach, or drifting through space. In a sign of just how confused we are, we even feel the need to wave goodbye at the end of a Zoom call. It's exhausting.

What are the challenges of Zoom calls, or indeed most other video conferencing tools? There are three main issues:

1. Visual distractions. We are not used to seeing ourselves in action, and it's easy to become fixated, or at least distracted, by how we look. It's easy for the meeting to then feel like a performance. Simultaneously seeing multiple faces is also strange. We wouldn't normally have people lined up in a grid like the start of the Brady Bunch, but rather be attending to one or two faces at any point in time. Reseach has repeatedly demonstrated that visual distractions significantly decrease our ability to focus and increase stress.

2. Auditory distractions. The inability for everyone to speak at once is a real issue. The small delays and "loudest person wins" nature of Zoom make auditory processing a challenge. The audio itself is of a higher quality than a typical phone call, but it still feels more draining than a landline phone call due to these artefacts.

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