Working from home is becoming more common again in the wake of the Omicron variant.
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The Omicron variant is causing companies to delay their return-to-office plans.
Zoom fatigue could be one challenge workers face, according to a Stanford professor.
Nick Bloom said that his research into remote meetings shows that smaller ones are more effective.
Some companies, like Google, have delayed their office-return plans as a result of the Omicron variant. In the UK, from December 12, workers will be asked to work from home where possible.
During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, companies went to great lengths to maintain morale and culture while colleagues were working from home.
Bloom said that Zoom fatigue could be one of the challenges that remote workers face if they go back to working from home full-time.
He said this is something that they will have to put up with, in the same way that they put up with taxes they don’t want to pay.
But there are lessons we can learn from the last two years of a pandemic about how employees react to video meetings, according to Bloom.
“Zoom works well one-on-one, it doesn’t work well for virtual cocktail parties where there are 30 people and just one person talking,” said Bloom, during an interview at Insider’s Global Trends Festival.
Bloom said that Zoom conversations with up to four people can be effective, and are even deemed by the average person to be slightly better, online according to his research.
He said this is because, while it’s not as personable as a physical meeting, you can still see each other’s facial expressions and can call without having to mute, he said.
“By the time you get into 10-person-plus meetings, there are little boxes. You can’t really see people, you all have to mute,” Bloom said.
If colleagues want to reach out to socialize, they should schedule multiple one-on-ones or one-on-twos, instead of a 20-person call, he added.
Of course, Zoom hasn’t been all negative. The pandemic has taught us that we can work from home effectively, said Bloom. Something that would not have been as easy ten years ago when homeworkers needed to rely on email and phone.
“Technology like Zoom has come of age, thankfully, just in time to save the economy during the pandemic,” Bloom said.
Some white-collar workers are secretly taking on second and even third full-time jobs for more cash.
One 23-year-old told The Guardian he gave his third job to his sister, who was trying to find work.
“I attend the meetings to show my face, and she would do the bulk of the work,” he told the paper.
As millions of Americans consider leaving their jobs, another subset of workers is making a very different decision, instead choosing to add more work to their plates.
Some white-collar employees who are working remotely have secretly taken on second and even third full-time jobs, becoming “overemployed,” The Guardian reports. One 23-year-old in the US who had three jobs ended up giving one of them to his sister, who was having trouble finding work, according to the newspaper.
“I just gave her my corporate login and told her what to do,” the worker, identified in the article as Sam, told The Guardian. “I attend the meetings to show my face, and she would do the bulk of the work.”
The overemployment trend has gained steam with the rise of remote work, which has often meant less employer supervision of workers. This means juggling multiple jobs in secret is usually more feasible for wealthy, white-collar workers since their work can frequently be done remotely, which isn’t often the case for blue-collar workers.
A 25-year-old software engineer in the UK, told The Guardian he was often playing video games in his spare time and thought he should use that time to make more money instead. The man, identified in the article as Jamie, said he has taken on a second full-time job, this one in software development, and now brings home twice as much money as he did before.
“It was way easier than I thought it would be,” Jamie told The Guardian. “Both companies have very low expectations, so I’m not really struggling to get away with two jobs.”
Overemployed workers can sometimes run into trouble tending to multiple jobs at once. Juggling meetings, for example, can be tricky.
“You have to either be muted on both and without a camera or act like you can’t attend one of them because you are super busy,” Jamie told The Guardian. “I haven’t run into any problems. It’s quite chill.”
A digital community for workers with multiple full-time jobs has taken shape on Reddit, Discord, and Overemployed.com. The website’s founder, a 37-year-old tech employee in the US named Isaac, told The Guardian he started job-searching after hearing about layoffs at work and was ultimately able to more than double his salary, going from making $160,000 to $340,000.
“Doing two remote jobs at once was already happening; it was the biggest open secret out there in tech,” he told the newspaper. “The pandemic just accelerated the trend and made the environment more friendly to not just tech.”
One California worker, identified as 47-year-old Katya, told The Guardian she took on a second job in payroll after accumulating massive debt over hospital bills from her son’s death.
“I thought I was the only one doing it and for a while felt really bad,” she told the newspaper. “But I could finally pay my bills and get food without worrying about what else I needed my money for.”
The Guardian did not explicitly say it had verified employment for the sources in its article.
A CEO said wearing caps during meetings helped her 700 staff stay connected while working from home.
“Every single employee shows up” with a hat for meetings, Lisa Utzschneider, of Integral Ad Science, told the BBC.
“We show up with our hats on for one another, we are one team,” she said.
A CEO leading a company with 700 staff told the BBC that workers wear branded caps during video calls – and argues it’s helped employees feel connected to one another while working from home.
Lisa Utzschneider, CEO of Integral Ad Science (IAS), an advertising tech firm, told the BBC that staff began wearing caps during video calls at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The company saw it as a “rally cry” that everyone was part of the same team, she said.
Utzschneider has worn a cap in town-hall meetings, while on-boarding new employees, and during investor calls. She wasn’t wearing one during her interview, but says that “every single employee shows up” wearing a hat for meetings.
“It didn’t matter which country you were dialing in, the time zone, the function, the title, the level,” she said. “Wearing our hats together as a global organization unified our team.”
Some workers have struggled to keep a barrier between work and home life during the pandemic, and Utzschneider said that wearing a hat has helped her with that. “When my two young girls see I have the hat on, they know mum’s at work, and that means they can’t really come in and visit me, but when I come downstairs for a meal, they’ll tell me: ‘Mom, it’s time to take your hat off!'”
IAS, which works with companies including Disney and Sony to help them better target their advertising, went public in June.
Its New York and London offices are open, but most of the company’s staff are on a hybrid work model, per the BBC.
Some high-profile CEOs have raised concerns about the impact of remote working on company culture, employee relationships, and the quality of ideas. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, for example, has called training new staff virtually an “aberration” and urged bankers to return to their desks.
Management experts say that while it’s important for employees to feel connected, the quality of managers, pay, and whether people actually feel listened to are much more likely to determine company culture.
If meetings interrupt your progress, try asking which meetings actually add value to your team.
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If you lead meetings at work, it’s important to ensure they’re concise and make the most of everyone’s time.
Provide an agenda, clarify action items to stay on track, and recap what needs to get done.
Check in with your coworkers to ask which meetings they think are the most valuable and productive.
If you are like most business owners, you start the day by reviewing your calendar and seeing how many meetings you have for the day. Often, there are quite a few each day, many of which are marked as urgent. This can be a total productivity killer – not to mention a mood killer as well.
In fact, meetings are one of the first things I go over when I start working with a new business coaching client because it takes up such a huge portion of their day. When I find a client who is struggling with the constant barrage of meetings and interruptions, we go through a series of questions about the meetings that they hold. Questions like:
How many meetings do you have on an average day?
Do you have to be present for all of them, or are any of them able to be passed off to one of your team members?
Do all of the meetings you currently lead or participate in add real value?
Or have they just become a dull routine?
Which ones really add the most value?
Which meetings could be canceled, or made less frequent, or shorter?
Which meetings need to be added or extended?
1. Always plan your meetings in advance
If you don’t have an agenda, don’t hold the meeting. The chances of you going off the rails and wasting time on things that don’t create value are very high. Instead, postpone the meeting until you can dedicate a bit of time beforehand to lay out the agenda.
2. Start strong
Start on time and start strong. Jump right into your agenda, and get to the point. Everyone’s time is valuable and if you spend five or ten minutes of each meeting getting warmed up an hour or more might be wasted a day on small talk.
3. Stay focused
It’s easy to get sidetracked. It’s more difficult to stay on task but well worth the effort. Follow your agenda, and if you do find yourself on a tangent, write it down as a future action item and address it at another time.
4. Give everyone a chance to speak
Beware of one or two strong personalities hijacking your meeting. This includes you! A simple trick to give a voice to the quieter participants is to give them a moment to “jot down” their ideas, thoughts, or input to be shared with you later.
5. Clarify action items as you go
Got a long meeting and don’t want to miss anything? Flag all-important action items as you go, including:
Who?
Does what?
By when?
To what standard?
How to close the loop?
6. Recap after the meeting
After the meeting is over, send out a meeting recap email outlining the action items and discussion points that were covered in the meetings.
If needed, put the recap into your project management software as well.
Above all else, be consistent with your actions. A calendar full of pointless meetings is nothing to aspire to. A calendar full of well-planned out value-added meetings that will help propel your business forward is.
Remote working appears to be here to stay.However, as we all start to get “back to normal,” some companies are combining remote and office work.
The challenge now, of course, is to coordinate this new normal and to ensure that companies remain productive while their employees have a good work-life balance. Remote working has meant more meetings with more people, more emails, and longer working hours.
Therefore, some companies have decided to implement rules in their working day to prevent workers from burning out. One of these measures is the so-called “core hours,” when workers must be available for Zoom meetings, joint projects with other departments, or any other activity that involves teamwork.
These hours would be set between 10 am and 2 pm, or 1 pm and 4 pm, although it depends on the company. However, they wouldn’t exceed three or four hours a day.
The rest of the time would be hours free from any meetings, so employees can organize their working day and make better use of their time without being tied up in last-minute meetings.
This is nothing new, however.
A lot of companies have been doing this for decades – it’s a savvy way of avoiding afternoon meetings dragging on past the end of the working day, which can have a negative impact on teams’ personal lives.
But the pandemic has led many to jump on the trend.
Google, Dropbox, and Slack have set up meeting-free hours
Google established a week without meetings while companies like Dropbox and Slack have also set up a “meeting-free hours” strategy during the working day.
Laura Ryan, international human resources director at Dropbox, told Insiderhow a simple review of her calendar meant she was able to cut up to 15 hours of meetings per week.
Dropbox has implemented a strategy of “core collaboration hours,” in which it set aside certain hours just for meetings so employees could then freely and flexibly structure their working day as they wished.
This is something that companies such as Slack have also done.
“If you give people from 9 am to 5 pm to organize meetings, they will up with non-stop meetings all day. So they won’t be able to get anything else done,” vice-president of the Slack Future Forum Brian Elliot told The Wall Street Journal.
The Slack Future Forum is a consortium launched by the company to help other companies reflect on the future of work.
In Spain, a pilot program has been launched to trial the 4-day working week in order to improve work-life balance and productivity.
However, how the working day itself is organized – that is, the hours worked in the same day – varies depending on the sector and the company.
One example of a Spanish startup at the forefront of remote working and flexibility is Irisbond, a company that manufactures eye-tracking devices and technology.
Irisbond’s offices are designed as collaborative spaces for working in the cloud and using applications to communicate between team members such as Discord, Slack, and Google Meet.
In addition, their teams are self-organized and share results or the status of their projects only every two weeks, which slows down the flow of information.
When Insider asked Irisbond’s CEO and founder Eduardo Jáuregui about flexibility, he said: “The team can come to the office in the morning, go home for lunch, and finish the day from there. This makes it easier for everyone to have lunch with their family or at home.”
In March 2020 the way that many companies worked changed forever. With much of the world in lockdown, those that could were thrown into working remotely – some for the first time.
How well a person coped was largely dependent on factors like their age, job role, living situation, and the quality of the manager – but in some ways, the playing field leveled.
The hybrid working plans that many companies are rolling out following the pandemic will change that, according to Karin Reed, co-author of “Suddenly Virtual: How to Make Remote Meetings Work.”
There is a huge difference between being virtual like many were at the start of the pandemic, and the hybrid way of working that many companies are planning for, said Reed.
With people split between the home and the office, companies will go from a situation where there is a single mode of communication to one where people are showing up from different locations, and potentially using different means of communication, said Reed.
This could easily lead to meetings becoming confusing or tip the conversation in favor of those who are physically in the room. That could mean those who work remotely are overlooked.
Early research indicates that it may be primarily women who lose out as a result, with more women (31%) than men (23%) saying they would prefer to work at home all the time, per December data from Pew.
Adapting to hybrid will require employees and managers to rethink how they communicate, Reed, who is a former broadcast journalist and now coaches CEOs on communication, told Insider.
She shared some top tips for remote workers to avoid getting lost in hybrid meetings.
1. Be engaged, even if your manager is leading
Video call from home featuring grid view.
Alistair Berg/Getty Images
Ultimately managers have the overwhelming responsibility to create presence for everyone in the meeting, but attendees also have a responsibility to understand who is in the meeting, said Reed.
Ideally, before launching into any sort of hybrid environment, there should be a team agreement to determine expectations and possibly develop a turn-taking policy.
However, regardless of who your manager is, it is important to create as much presence for yourself as possible, said Reed. Keeping your camera on is an obvious basic essential.
“If you are joining remotely, having your camera off makes it much more likely that you will be overlooked,” said Reed.
2. Buddy up
If they can, remote workers should seek out an “in-room buddy” who can act as an advocate and pull them into conversations, suggested Reed. This could just be a fellow team member or friend who is in physical attendance.
It’s also important to think about how you participate.
This doesn’t always need to be verbal, said Reed. Using features like chat or “raise hand” present in most mainstream video call apps can also help to boost your presence.
“Hopefully the leader will attend to it and weave it into the dialogue, but trying to participate in as many forms as are available to you is a great best practice,” advised Reed.
3. Over-communicate about your emotions
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Another significant challenge that virtual attendees will have to overcome is the “stunted” nature of virtual communication, which can make it harder to read body language and other non-verbal cues, explained Reed.
“If you’re remote, let people know how you’re feeling about something. If you were in person with that person, you could probably gather that nuance better, but virtual is a little bit harder to read,” said Reed.
Actively “verbalizing your emotions” can help people to better understand the intent of your message if they can’t easily perceive your non-verbal cues.
4. Make it easier for others to read you with good lighting
Finally, Reed said, remember how you look on screen is important. But it’s not all about vanity, it’s about having respect for your conversation partner.
“It doesn’t matter that much to us if we show up with our face in shadow, but it makes it very difficult for your conversation partner to receive your message in full,” said Reed.
Aside from ensuring that your face is evenly illuminated, other key things to focus on are how you’re framed – showing your full face and a large part of your body to ensure that people can read your body language – and to ensure that your background is not too distracting.
I can feel the electricity in the room when I’m in front of a live audience. I know if there’s spirited conversation before the event begins, and I can read people’s faces and body language.
Eileen Smith.
Eileen Smith
All these cues feed my energy and how I project it back to my listeners.
Of course, when everything moved online during the pandemic, I had to figure out how to get these cues back. I found myself reaching out through chat rooms and using polls to take the pulse of my virtual audiences.
As we move back to the office again, even if it’s in a hybrid workplace, many of our public-speaking skills might be a little rusty. Here are five ways to dust yours off and excel in that first in-person gathering.
Remember your performance starts when you enter the room
The beginning of an event or meeting is not the time to tuck into your phone or study your notes. When you enter a venue, your performance has already begun.
Project a strong executive presence by walking in with your eyes up and shoulders back. Say hello to people you know and introduce yourself to people you don’t. Engage in conversation until the meeting begins. Greet everyone like a boss or old friend.
For a more formal speaking event, once you’re set up with your technology and materials, stand by the door and introduce yourself to people as they arrive. If you’re holed away in a green room, you can find your fellow speakers or even a few staffers to talk with.
This approach has a few advantages. First, it gives you the opportunity to ask people what brings them in and what they most want to learn from this event. Then weave their stories or questions into your talk to make it more personal.
Second, keeping yourself involved in conversation until the event begins may help calm your nerves. Otherwise, you might spend those last minutes building anxiety about how your first foray back into a live audience will go.
Third, audience members who have had a chance to say hello will feel more connected to you as a speaker.
Make eye contact
Your goal when speaking in person is to make actual eye contact. Don’t look above your audience at the back wall, don’t stare at a spot on the table, and don’t look at the forest, but miss the trees.
I like to separate my audience into three sections. In each section, I seek out my new best friend. It doesn’t matter whether I’ve met this person before. I’m looking for someone who’s giving me positive feedback – smiling and nodding at what I have to say.
Once you’ve found your three new best friends, one for each section of your audience, take turns making direct eye contact with them while you’re speaking.
Wait until you reach a punctuation mark in your sentence before you move on to your next best friend. This helps you regulate your eye movement. If you switch between people too fast, you risk giving off the windshield-wiper effect. If you linger on one person for too long, it can become uncomfortable.
Gesture with meaning
At home on a video screen, small gestures are the rule. Perhaps you’ve been consciously keeping your gestures within the camera frame so they aren’t lost from view. Or perhaps the low-key work-from-home environment has depleted your inspiration for big gestures.
Either way, in person you can spread out.
If you’re someone who naturally talks with your hands, that’s wonderful. However, make a recording of yourself on your phone so you can check to see that your hands are saying what you think they’re saying. A little emphasis is good. Too much is, well, too much.
An important thing to keep in mind after hunching in your home office for so long is to keep your posture strong and body open. Crossed arms, hands clasped down in front like a fig leaf, and fidgeting with your hands are signs of discomfort.
Look self-assured by deploying confident hand gestures. Steepling “is a universal display of confidence and is often used by those in a leadership position,” Joe Navarro, a retired FBI agent and author, told Insider. You can also try nesting your hands together lightly or holding them separately at your midsection. Hands down by your sides is another confident position. This is a favorite for many world leaders, as seen at the recent G7 Summit
Move with purpose
Moving around when you’re speaking in front of people is an effective way to hold their attention.
Step to one side of the stage or conference room to connect with that part of the audience. Stay there until you finish your thought. Try out that solid eye contact. Then move to the other side of the stage or another spot. Finish your thought before you move again.
Be measured in your movement. When you’re standing still, avoid shuffling, tapping, or otherwise letting your legs betray your nervous energy. When you’re not walking, take a strong stance, keep your posture straight, and hold your feet firm.
Treat nerves as excitement and energy
Keep in mind that your audience wants you to succeed – if only for the simple reason that it’s uncomfortable to watch someone who’s outwardly nervous. Turn that tension into positive energy and project confidence on the outside.
If your nerves are threatening to get the best of you, take a moment. “The breath is a direct line to the nervous system and the brain,” Tara Antonipillai, a corporate wellness expert, told Insider. “Remind yourself that you can turn off the panic response in the brain and turn on that thinking reasoning part of the brain by simply slowing down and deepening the breath.”
Also, try mentally reframing your nervous reaction into excitement. Build your confidence through preparation and practice, print your notes as a safety net in case you forget what you want to say, and focus your thoughts on all the wonderful things that can happen, instead of thinking about what might go wrong.
Eileen Smith is a public-speaking coach, keynote speaker, and former diplomat. Find her tips to help business executives, policy experts, and rising professionals achieve preparation, confidence, and career success at Spokesmith.com.
When Dropbox asked its 2,500 employees to audit their calendars to analyze whether there was anything they could cut, its international HR director Laura Ryan realized she “was in 15 hours of standing meetings a week, not adding value to any of those.”
“They had just built up over time. That wasn’t allowing for any ad hoc meetings, which certainly wasn’t allowing much work to get done,” Ryan told Insider.
The audit was the first step towards the “non-linear work day” that Dropbox began implementing in October, shortly after it announced it would shift to “virtual-first” working in which remote working was the default.
Teams define “core collaboration” hours for meetings and individuals are free to structure the rest of their day whenever they want.
This could be evening or early hours, whatever best suits when they function best and when they’re naturally inclined to sleep.
Under this system, Ryan, who is based in Dublin, Ireland, cut a third of the 15 hours of meetings she was in and re-thought her contribution to others.
Now, her day typically starts with preparation, breakfast and school drop-offs.
At 10 a.m., the first of her core collaboration hours begins, which are generally spent on calls. Between 12 p.m. and 4 p.m. she is meeting-free and will respond to emails, work on documents, and take a walk.
She then goes back into collaboration mode, spending between 4 p.m. to 6.30 p.m. on calls, with the occasional late international call.
Ryan said that, after employees do their calendar audit, they’re asked to block out the core collaboration hours needed.
Respecting other colleagues’ independent time by not requesting meetings outside collaboration hours – and equally not accepting meetings outside your own – was key, she added.
So is clearly communicating schedule preferences to others in the team so no one thinks a person has gone AWOL when actually they intend to be working from 8 p.m. to midnight that day.
Current company guidelines state that the “collaboration hours” should take place between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. and between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m., to allow for some cross-time zone meetings.
Teams, however, can adjust these as required. The rest of the time is reserved for independent, focused work, and does not have to be during the traditional working day but any time the employee prefers.
Regardless of how someone cuts up their day, the idea was to move away from a mindset of “busy for the sake of it” to “impact,” said Ryan.
With office perks less of an attraction for future candidates, Dropbox will be emphasizing the policy in recruitment, Ryan said.
New employees will be able to discuss their preferred work pattern, be they early birds or night owls, with their line manager during their onboarding. Team meetings could be shifted earlier or later, as long as all are in agreement, Ryan added.
Some teams lend themselves to a work pattern outside of conventional hours naturally. Engineering teams, Ryan said, typically start and end later.
And any role that is not customer-facing, such as HR, or marketing and communications, could work well in a non-linear fashion.
Sales teams, for example, need to work more traditionally as most of the company’s customers are still working this way.
But Ryan said Dropbox’s sales teams have introduced a rotation system so staff can still do non-linear working hours on certain days.
Ryan said the company was willing to tweak the system as time goes on.
“We’re not going to get this right on day one, but we’ll figure it out together,” she added.
Employees are tired of meetings. They’re burned out from looking at their computers and Zoom fatigue is on the rise.
The number of meetings has skyrocketed during the pandemic. By February 2021, employees were spending 2.5 times as many minutes in meetings, according to an analysis from Microsoft.
If you can’t reduce your meetings, but want a change of scenery, a walking meeting could be a good solution. Plus, research has shown that walking is one of the best things you can do to counter the effects of sitting all day.
A 2016 study conducted by the University of Miami published in the journal Preventing Chronic Disease found that replacing one regular meeting a week with a walking meeting increased the amount of high-intensity physical activity happening in a week by 10 minutes. This suggested that the walking meetings were having a positive impact on the worker’s health.
The small pilot study only looked at 17 people who worked at the university in office jobs. The participants were given accelerometers to track how fast they were moving over time.
In the first week of the experiment, the participants were asked to go about their week the way they normally would. For the second two weeks, they were asked to set up a 30-minute walking meeting once a week with the other members of the study.
Here are some of the other added benefits the researchers observed:
Some said they were more focused on the meeting itself, since they couldn’t be on their computer working on other tasks.
The walking meetings kept their agendas on track, and the meeting ran efficiently.
Some used it as a way to de-stress during the busy day.
The meetings were easy to add to work routines, suggesting that it wouldn’t be too difficult to apply this to a larger group.
Although the study was relatively small, the researchers pointed out some ways to expand. They recommended that future studies increase the number of walking meetings each week and that they look at the effects on a larger number of participants.
