The Pandemic is having a profound impact on the way we work; the disruption that we are going through is already seen in an evident fatigue due to virtual meetings, so it is necessary to change the way we work. With 58% of office workers anticipating that they will work eight or more days each month from home and with the expectation that 98% of meetings will feature remote participants, a new hybrid way of working is emerging.
So let’s start by making a catharsis of what you may have experienced during your virtual meetings, for example, not knowing the tool you use to have virtual sessions can lead you to despair and even more so if you had not used it before, the interruption of the internet or from electric current which is unpredictable; and you have probably prepared your presentation well but when you present it you will be left offline.
In addition to this, details that we take for obvious such as the chair, the desk and the lighting in the work area and being sedentary for many hours without having adequate work furniture, will generate additional fatigue.
Also, the loss of audio and video that can happen for different reasons, such as the amount of available memory and processing resources in the computer and the consumption of bandwidth that is no longer enough because it is now shared with the family whose space sharing can translate into a lack of privacy at certain times of the day or as noisemakers during an important meeting, adding to the various causes of fatigue.
The before and after
Now we are going to use as an exercise something that allows us to remember the benefits of remote work: For this to have a positive impact on you, visualize yourself in the workspace at home doing your usual tasks and jobs, disassociate yourself from the image, as if you were a person who is seeing yourself. What do you see? Let it pause for a moment …
Get out of that thought where you see yourself and remember what it was like before you worked from home; very contrasting right? Some examples of what we see as benefits of being at home are: the reduction in travel times, since you now have productivity at the moment, you can even spend more time with the family, exercise and take advantage of those minutes and even hours that represented going from home to office.
Lower expenses for transportation supplies, considering gasoline, car maintenance, parking payment, or the expense generated by public transportation, are something that today is no longer discounting from your income and, time with the family, that for some people it is their main motivation to go out to work and it even was difficult to give yourselves the space to make a call or send a message; Now they are in the next room, smile and feel the sensation it generates.
Therefore, to avoid virtual work fatigue, ultimately, it will be necessary to take the best advantage of:
● Collaborative tools that allow you to work remotely without compromising employee safety or productivity.
● Adoption programs, which may or may not be generated by your own company, today you read this article on a digital platform, ignorance for you is an option not a limiting condition, since knowledge is on the Internet.
● Use video to enrich your listening, visual and kinesthetic experience during the meetings and you will see that little by little you will develop different skills that will allow you to be more successful.
● Integrate tools where you facilitate and encourage the participation of attendees.
● Review the new Cisco Webex People Insights proposition, which aligns with the goals each user personally sets for their meetings, work life integration, connections, and focus time, with a design that puts people first so the information is available from three points of view: Personal, Team and Organizational, all backed by privacy and security to ensure that this information is only available to you.
Decide how you want to see it, however, remember that the greenest garden is always seen at the neighbor’s side, we are living what we probably saw at the other end of that garden, we have the opportunity to create an environment that improves our experiences, Let us seek to rebuild from this present, in any case there is no going back … Let us evolve towards adaptability for transformation!
