At work, someone wanted to talk with me about answering the question of “Do people at work feel zoom fatigue?” What would be a good way to look at this question from a data perspective?
I proposed the following question, now that we don’t have to commute, shouldn’t we
- have more time in the morning to exercise because our morning commutes are anywhere between 30 to 90 minutes in the bay area?
- Have lunch with our family and household because we are all home between 12 and 1pm?
- Take care of ourselves after work because we are saving time from the evening commute?
I am exercising a lot more because of 90 minutes of tennis in the morning, but I’m not having lunch with family because we are on zoom during lunchtime. After work, I’m still working because I don’t have a clear boundary of when to stop working.
To bring life at work to a new normal:
First of all, my own team and myself, I think we are zoomed out, and we should not work as if we were face to face, but replace the same way of working as if we were in the office. Even without evidence, we have implemented the following changes to our team of 14 people.
For 1:1’s. – For our team’s weekly 30 minutes 1:1’s, we are doing phone audio only on traditional phone calls, and I will offer a chance to do walking outside meetings. We can take interesting pictures along our walk and share them back with the team Slack channels. Here are some of my photos along the walk with my direct reports.
Standups: First, we are no longer doing scrum standups via Zoom. We will send via Slack our statuses, and people who have an interest in the status will reply in a thread to ask questions or offer help. We will use Zoom only for those people who need to get unblocked or do troubleshooting with the team or me.
On Mondays, we will just do demos and code walkthroughs and use that as a learning experience.
On Tues – Wed – Slack updates and Zoom unblocking (optional)
On Fridays – no face to face meetings on Zoom