Kate Murphy

And if you don't have it on some baseline level, you may never, but that's not to say you will never.

Yeah.

Well, to the degree you can meet with other people and prioritize meeting people or at least have a regular meeting with the people that you work with, that, of course, is best.

The research is pretty clear about Zoom, about video interaction, that it actually causes people to be less in sync.

They've done some really interesting studies about people who just did audio only versus video were more in sync neurophysiologically, did better on common tasks, interrupted less, were more in sync in their communication, that kind of thing.

I mean, if you think about it, the way video conferencing and video technology is done really to preserve bandwidth, the way it's coded and patched and synthesized, it introduces all these artifacts that like freezing, blocking, out of sync video, out of sync audio, that kind of thing, which really scrambles our ability to sync with one another.

Because we're looking at this person who looks like they're on a security camera at a convenience store, essentially sort of that sort of blocky.

They're not looking at you.

You can't have eye contact.

And how they look depends on the camera angle.

So I would recommend people, I mean, certainly show a PowerPoint, say hello in the beginning.

If you have product developments you want to show by video, great.

But if you're really trying to have a meaningful conversation and have that sense of connection and intimacy over the phone, I mean, over a communication system, I would use the phone, audio only.

I think that that is a better way to go.

Certainly research supports that.

And, you know, Zoom fatigue is real.

It's because you're scrambling to try and sync up with the other person and you have all this faulty information that's being transmitted to you.

Like you can't make eye contact.

You can't really read those subtle facial expressions.

So your brain is scrambling to find it and can't find it.