Council Post: The Importance Of Combatting Screen Fatigue Among Your Remote Team

Sean Higgins, CEO of BetterYou

This has been the year of virtual work, with leaders and employees shifting to video experiences for all their internal company, and sometimes even personal, meetups.

But I believe all the unbridled device time has a cost. From my perspective, for many people working from home, work hours and personal hours have become blurred, and the risk of employee burnout has risen since the beginning of the pandemic.

Same Story, Different Day

Device time has been a top destination for discretionary time for years. Since the pandemic began, screen time has increased significantly. According to The New York Times, in March, Zoom’s daily app sessions grew to more than 6 million, Google Classroom’s daily sessions exceeded more than 4 million and Microsoft Teams surpassed 2 million daily app sessions. To me, moving work fully online accelerated the changes we were already seeing.

While apps such as these can be useful, the risk here is that increased screen time has been linked to depression and poor mental health. In a world where we ask our teams to be online 40 or more hours per week with many digital interactions woven in, you might be wondering: How can you help your people find a balance?

Thankfully, there are ways that you as a leader can help your team fight “Zoom fatigue” and other device-related burnout.

Actions Leaders Can Take

Combatting screen fatigue is not as simple as leaving your phone locked up in a drawer somewhere or declining video chat invitations that come your way. Here are some tips that you can bring to your team:

1. Schedule meetings for midmorning or later. Requiring extended device time first thing in the morning can derail us before we’ve had a chance to prioritize our day. Imagine forming your day around missed emails or texts. That’s often what we create when we ask our employees to get on their computers and connect right away. Consider scheduling your meetings for later in the morning so that your team has time to settle in.

2. Don’t make every meeting a video meeting. Not every call has to be on video. Try to limit the number of video meetings you create for the team. If you have over five video calls in a day, I consider that a sign that you might be overdoing it. A phone call gives you and the team a chance to move around more and still connect.

3. Avoid holding unnecessary meetings. If you are providing a status update or recap, consider if what you are sharing could instead go out in a chat message or an email. If the meeting you are booking doesn’t have a strong answer to, “Does everyone need to be here at once?” then you might consider just sharing the news via message instead.

4. Measure your team’s appetite for socially distant events. Rather than solely holding virtual events for team building, consider your team’s comfort level for connecting in a socially distant manner. If you are hosting a virtual event one week, could you offer those who feel safe to join in a picnic or a distant outing? Opening this discussion will give your team a chance to decide whether they are willing to interact with more than just a talking head on a screen.

5. Have a time each day when team members can be largely unplugged. If you use Microsoft Teams, Slack or another chat application, it can be easy to feel like you’re online all the time. Use a “do not disturb” feature to have some quiet time during the day. This is time that should be largely meeting-free and allow people to take some time away from the chat. 

6. Change the default appointment length for your company. When you do need to have a video meeting, sometimes you don’t need to take a large portion of your employees’ day. Instead of automatically assuming every conversation must be 30 minutes, change the default appointment setting. I’ve found that a 20-minute meeting default, for example, will get 10 minutes back in my team’s day and can easily amount to an extra four hours of work time saved for all of us.

The decisions our team makes throughout the day are shaped by the structure we provide for them. From my perspective, by shifting that structure in a positive way — such as providing shorter meetings and allowing time to unplug — we’re able to help our team avoid burnout and make healthier decisions. 

Take a hard look at your team: If you have a group committed to getting the job done but it’s costing your employees’ work-life balance and risking creating a culture of burnout in your company, it’s time to make a change.

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