“Hey, we're two weeks into summer break!” Joe quipped on his “Family Zoom call” with the extended Allen clan on March 29, 2020. It wasn't the first video call with his family, but it soon became standard practice for Joe's family as well as countless other folks who found video calls to be a lifeline for connecting with loved ones when face‐to‐face interactions were off‐limits. Birthday parties, baby showers, practically every meaningful moment went virtual, and all of us made do. The real problems arose from spending both our personal and professional lives through a webcam, which led to a host of issues, including digital exhaustion, a lack of boundaries between work and home life, and a steep rise in mental health problems from anxiety to depression, just to name a few.
Hybrid meetings should help alleviate some of these woes, but only if we carefully consider how to avoid making the same mistakes we made when we were fully remote. The truth is that the work‐from‐home experiment taught us many things. During this time we (Joe and Karin), like so many others, worked from home, lived on our webcams, and tried to remain as productive as possible, but as a meeting scientist and communication expert, we also sought to make sense of the work‐from‐home situation, and accordingly, we learned quite a bit, which is the focus of this chapter.
In this chapter, we will explore:
In Joe's home state of Utah, you could clearly see what happened when work went home … literally. Utah, sadly, is known for being home to a weather phenomenon called an inversion, where pollution is trapped in the valleys between the mountain ridges. These inversions can make breathing difficult for just about everyone, but in 2020, residents experienced a summer of the cleanest air quality in recent memory. For the first time in Joe's lifetime, you could hike up to the top of Ensign Peak on the border of Salt Lake and Davis Counties and see both valleys and their surrounding mountains and beyond with perfect clarity. Why? Because people were at home, not driving their cars or flying on airplanes. During this time, people literally breathed easier, amid the ambiguity and stress of the pandemic.
But more broadly, when people went home, they really got to work. Despite having to rely on their personal internet connections, productivity levels remained stable or even improved (Gaskell 2021). However, this came at a cost. According to Microsoft's 2021 Work Trend Index completed in February 2021, 54% of workers felt overworked and 39% said they were exhausted. Now imagine if every organization's climate survey (a snapshot of how things are going in the workplace environment in general) suddenly showed that half of its people were at risk for burning out and more than a third of its workers already were burned out. That's 93% of the workforce! It would set off alarm bells at the highest levels of the organization and elicit a swift response. First, every manager and C‐level executive would likely spend some time breathing into a metaphorical paper bag to ward off hyperventilation – but then they would start asking this question to every person who might have a possible clue: “Why is everyone burning out?”
In the case of the Microsoft report, the answer might have seemed obvious. Duh, there was a pandemic, so some of the burnout and exhaustion was justifiable from the inherent stressful nature of the constant worry about oneself, family, and particularly older loved ones at highest risk. But no climate survey we know of was prescient enough to have questions that dove deeper into the root cause about such things as life stressors, whether they were experienced individually or by everyone. However, Microsoft's survey told us some meaningful things about the workplace itself that we can use to identify some cause and effect beyond COVID‐19. We would like to highlight some of them specifically.
If you take a look at your online calendar for much of 2020 and at least the first part of 2021, this will come as no surprise: globally, our time in meetings doubled from February 2020 to February 2021. Without the luxury of popping into someone's office down the hall, even those quick check‐ins seemed to require an official “meeting invite,” often on a video collaboration platform. With many calendar apps defaulting to a set period of time, chunks of time were eaten up quickly and clogged many a calendar. What might have been a five‐minute catch‐up blossomed into a 30‐minute placeholder.
Prior to 2020, meeting scientists were claiming we already had a meeting load epidemic in terms of the number of meetings and time spent in them, and here's the real rub. Previous research as early as 2006 showed that people's daily fatigue levels were affected by their meetings, particularly when those meetings interrupted their workflow (Rogelberg, Leach, Warr, and Burnfield 2006). So the more meetings you are in, the more tired you are likely to be at the end of the day. The pandemic put that into overdrive by taking everyone's meeting burden and doubling it.
So, how did that affect people? It was not healthy across the board, but it was more problematic for workers in certain roles than for others. For example, managers were used to their days being heavily populated by meetings, but those whose roles required them to think deeply and innovate – think designers, coders, copywriters, and the like – found the interruptions to their idea creation time untenable. How can someone get into the flow when they're constantly being pulled out of it and being pulled into meetings?
Some organizations course‐corrected as the detrimental effects became more and more apparent, and instituted things like “No Meeting Mondays” or allowed employees to designate “think hours” on their calendars. Culture Amp found that having calendar transparency across the entire organization makes people be more intentional before simply shooting off a calendar invite. “People are really upfront in blocking off time and saying, ‘This is my time to focus. No meetings for me at this time,’” said Jay Hyett. “What this does as a meeting organizer is that you can see, ‘Ah, the team's got a lot of focus time here.’ Don't just book stuff right over top of that.” Still, maintaining the sanctity of “think time” or “focus time” becomes tougher and tougher when the calendar gets more crowded.
Along with a dramatic increase in the number of meetings we were having, we also saw their time extended. No one has ever bemoaned a meeting that ends early, but everyone despises a meeting that ends late. The move to virtual meetings exacerbated the latter. Not only was the average meeting 10 minutes longer in February 2021 than in February 2020, but most meetings also overstayed their welcome … often by a lot. Instead of a 30‐minute meeting that ran five minutes long, people started having 30‐minute meetings that ran 15 minutes long.
Once again, managers recognized the problem and tried to implement solutions. A popular one was blocking out even more time for the meeting, so what was anticipated to be a 30‐minute meeting became a 45‐minute meeting to avoid running over. But that created a whole set of new problems. Longer meetings required more time being “on” – listening, participating, and contributing to the decisions being made – against the backdrop of the seemingly constant distractions that we were all fighting while trying to work from a place that was likely not designed to be where we should be working. It's no wonder many people started discovering virtual meeting fatigue as a new and nearly constant source of drain.
So far, we've talked about the meetings that were scheduled that were more numerous and often longer than intended, but we haven't even mentioned another major issue that cropped up: a rise in unplanned, or “pop‐up,” meetings. According to the February 2021 survey, 62% of calls and meetings on Microsoft Teams were unscheduled or ad hoc. So, picture this: your calendar is already chock‐full of scheduled meetings, the ones that you know you are expected to attend or lead. Then you are tasked with wedging in a significant number of meetings that simply crop up as a result of an immediate but unforeseen business need. How on earth do people fit twice as many scheduled meetings into their eight‐hour workday and then sandwich in 62% more impromptu meetings that just pop up but do not populate the official calendar? The answer is … they don't. Instead, people extended their workday in both directions. That's right – people dealt with the additional meeting burden by working longer, starting earlier and ending later.
The extension of the workday was seen by another research study conducted during the same timeframe as the one done by Microsoft. Researchers from Harvard and New York Universities at the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the average workday was 48 minutes longer during the pandemic than before (Green 2020). That means, in a given week, workers added four more hours to their regular work schedule. Now this might not seem so alarming, except when you consider this: in many cases, workers were already exceeding 40 hours a week, with some pushing 60 or more hours per week in 2019.
How did they do this? Let's help you visualize it through one of Joe's favorite pandemic “dad jokes.” On many a day and certainly well beyond the time his kids found it funny, Joe would grab a glass of water and his iPad to go down to his office in the basement, while announcing, “I'm starting my commute.” His commute used to be about 30 minutes each way. Now it amounted to 15 to 20 steps. What did he do with the extra time? Well, mostly he spent it staring into his webcam during scheduled and unscheduled meetings, along with simply working in general.
Sure, replacing one's commute with more work doesn't sound so bad. Think of all you can get done! However, that commuting time has value. It's often used to decompress, listen to an audio book in the car, read a book or the news on your phone while sitting on the bus, or simply listen to some tunes while trying not to use a rude gesture at the idiots on the freeway. Psychology research confirms that people often see their commute as their own personal, sacred time, when no one can bother them, and they can just relax from a long day's work (Wilhoit 2017). This transition time was lost for many during the pandemic, and what did we fill it with? Work.
A little discomfort for four more hours of productive work time may be a tradeoff you are willing to make, and some managers and leaders in organizations are likely okay with it, if not in favor of it. But, there's another more problematic driver of the expanding work day: work‐from‐home paranoia (Wilding 2021).
When colocated in the office, we are able to get continuous feedback. We can ask quick questions and can get a feel for how people are reacting to our work. When isolated on the sofa at home, how our work is being evaluated can be more difficult to ascertain. That longer feedback loop, or sometimes even an absence of one, can create a black hole in our perceptions of how our contributions are valued, and too often we fill that void with negative thoughts. This is “work‐from‐home paranoia,” the state of fear in which a person misinterprets ambiguous situations, seeing falsely negative meanings and potential threats when no such thing exists.
When we were all remote, we lacked those in‐person touchpoints, so employees tried to get a sense of where they stood with their managers and colleagues by reading the tone of emails or the vocal and nonverbal cues on video calls. That's a heavy lift in the best of circumstances, and with all the other stressors of that time, the uncertainty of whether their contributions were considered up to snuff put people into hyperdrive. They responded by working even harder and longer than might have been reasonable, and the lack of commute made that possible by giving employees extra hours in their days that they could fill with job‐justifying work – at least four hours more per week.
Working more wasn't the only by‐product of the meeting explosion that occurred during the pandemic. There was also a normalization of a meeting behavior that would have been considered the height of rudeness during an in‐person meeting. Let's take a closer look.
Imagine you are attending a meeting with everyone gathered around the same conference table. No one is remote; everyone is in‐person. The purpose of the meeting is mission‐critical and the stakes are high with very real impacts on the business's bottom line. The leader of the meeting is working her way through the agenda, but then you notice out of the corner of your eye something a bit odd. One of your colleagues is very visibly answering emails and loudly plucking away on her keyboard. Then you start scanning the other attendees. Some are actively listening to the leader and even participating by offering input. However, there are more than a few who are on their own laptops, or scrolling through their phones, or simply zoning out. What is going on? Don't these attendees, who are obviously not paying attention, know how disrespectful and rude this is? And that's not even considering how much is lost by their lack of contribution to the discussion.
When a meeting is held in person and everyone can easily see what each person is doing, multitasking is nearly impossible to pull off without being called out, but during the pandemic when almost all meetings were virtual, multitasking was a coping mechanism that was green‐lighted almost out of desperation. People first just tried to expand their workday to compensate for meetings exploding onto their calendars, but it wasn't enough. The to‐do lists were getting longer and the time available to accomplish those tasks was shrinking. So, people tried something even more difficult to pull off in a truly effective way … multitasking. That's right, people tried to do more than one thing at a time, which we have known for many years is really a myth. People actually cannot do two things at once effectively or with true focus. There's a reason why we joke about walking and chewing gum at the same time. While on a Zoom call with their team, they managed the kids’ online schooling, banged out a few emails, and secured a grocery pickup time slot. The problem with this effort toward efficiency may have come to light later that day, perhaps in the form of an email from their boss, asking where the report was that they were supposed to have completed and submitted by lunchtime. They were given the assignment during that earlier meeting, but somewhere in all that multitasking, that assignment got lost.
Here's the thing: even with countless cautionary tales such as these, people still believe that multitasking can work. For example, in a WIRED article (Johnson 2021), Microsoft's chief scientist, Jaime Teevan, stated, “There's an opportunity with remote meetings to just ‘sort‐of’ attend a meeting.” We've probably all successfully “sort‐of” attended a meeting, where others talked, decisions were made, none of them mattered to our work, and we were on video typing away at our email, with no one saying a word about it or expecting our participation. However, in our view, this is not a meeting success story. Instead, this is a prime example of a bad meeting, or at least one you should not have had to attend. If it wasn't relevant to you and your participation was not expected or required, why were you there in the first place? A meeting you can “sort‐of” attend is likely a meeting you should have been given a pass to miss.
Going a bit further, though, Jaime stated, “You can skip a meeting and watch it at double‐speed if it was recorded. You can have it playing in the background while you do other things and listen for important points.” This is an intriguing concept, but there's still a problem here. Listening for important points while a meeting is “playing in the background” also requires us to do two things at the same time. Our brains will not effectively allow us to separate the noise from the key takeaways if we are doing something else that is requiring our attention. You'll more than likely cost yourself even more time and effort because you will have to surrender to actually watching it again, this time without distraction.
We cannot endorse multitasking because the science is clear. Multitasking is a myth (Rosen 2008). People actually cannot pay attention to more than one thing at a time. That's a fact of sensation and perception research and is taught to every student who takes a Psychology 101 class (Crenshaw 2008). That's why the idea of “sort‐of” attending a meeting might sound good … but only in theory. You may think you are doing two things at one time, but you aren't. You are simply giving attention to other tasks while the meeting carries on. You may have seen this play out in meetings you've attended. Someone is called on who clearly has been multitasking. They might try to cover it up by saying, “What's that? You were cutting out. My internet has been choppy today. What was the question?” The person is then brought up to speed on what they missed, wasting valuable meeting time due to their multitasking behavior. What's worse, the offender typically answers the question and then resumes their “sort‐of” attending behavior.
It probably comes as no surprise that a study from Microsoft found that more multitasking occurs in larger and longer meetings than it does in recurring meetings (Johnson 2021). There are a few reasons for this. First, people feel more anonymous in larger meetings. Responsibility is diffused in these larger settings, so people feel they can check out and get some real work done. Second, longer meetings start to make people anxious because of their ever‐increasing inbox “to‐read” list. They feel like they have to check their email and get back to those seemingly urgent requests, even at the expense of contributing in the meeting. Third, recurring meetings are usually with longer‐standing teams. These meetings tend to include people that matter the most to them in a professional sense. So in those meetings, they pay more attention because they don't want their direct boss or their colleagues to think less of them.
But it doesn't stop there. According to Microsoft's data (Johnson 2021), morning meetings have higher rates of multitasking. That's probably because the inbox is fresh from the overnight emailing that people in other time zones sent, or from people who couldn't sleep. And the longer the meeting goes on, the more likely people will multitask. Multitasking happens six times more often in video meetings lasting more than 80 minutes compared with video meetings that are 20 minutes or less.
Prior to the pandemic, organizational scientists studied something often referred to as the “work–family interface” (Major and Burke 2013). This area refers to how work interferes with or enriches family life. More common terms used in the literature for this concept include “work–family conflict” and “work–life balance.” In general, this all refers to how a person's work and employment as well as their personal life interact in both positive and negative ways (Greenhaus, Allen, and Spector 2006). For example, many have experienced times they had to work late, and that interfered with evening plans with family, friends, or loved ones. Alternatively, many have had the experience of receiving a sizable raise at work or a promotion that resulted in more resources being available at home. Joe recalls getting a sizable increase in his salary and feeling a significant weight lifted, knowing that it would be easier to pay for all of those dance classes for his four daughters. That's work–family enrichment at its finest.
The work–family interface came to the fore during the pandemic, as the stay‐at‐home mandates blurred the boundary between work and home like never before. People who typically worked in an office now worked at home with no commute to buffer the good or bad from work spilling over at home. No longer was there some distance, if any at all, between the small children at home and the videoconference call. Now the kids made cameo appearances, or the cat decided to type an email, or the dog needed attention, and it was all within view of co‐workers and customers. Home and work, work and home, were now colocated for a vast majority of people.
Sure, some employees had dealt with this before. Prior to the pandemic, some had even sought alternative work schedules that actually allowed for more working‐from‐home situations. However, no one had experienced the expanding workday and the explosion of scheduled and unscheduled meetings that occurred during COVID‐19. Suddenly, the flexibility dreamed about or even stigmatized in 2019 was had by just about everyone, and it wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Keeping work at work and home at home was nearly impossible and work–family balance became out‐of‐whack.
Some of the solutions people found for regaining balance were simple enough to employ. Locks were put on de facto office doors, as were signs that said things like, “I'm in a meeting. Do not interrupt unless bleeding.” (That only worked for those whose children were able to read, of course.) There were also daily negotiations on who could gobble up the bandwidth at what times. When the kids had a synchronous Zoom class, the parents tried to keep that time slot free of video calls to ensure that the classroom experience was not compromised. The list of these ad hoc solutions goes on and on, with reports of varied results.
But are there some overall strategies that we can use to better define our work life and our home life when both take place in the same physical space? We'll focus on a few common problems and offer some solutions that have proven successful in creating boundaries when we live where we work and work where we live.
As a meeting leader, you can play a pivotal role in providing separation by being mindful of when you schedule meetings. For example, if your team's typical schedule is from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., you can make sure to not schedule any meetings outside that timeframe. That's a relatively light lift if your team resides in the same time zone, but becomes a bit more challenging if your team is scattered across several. For those who have a team that crosses time zones, you need to be mindful of what time it is for everyone. Remember, a 4 p.m. meeting in California is a 7 p.m. meeting in New York. Scheduling gets even trickier when teams are international in nature and, say, the North Carolina folks need to meet with the Germany folks.
Lisette Sutherland from Collaboration Superpowers offers these tips for working with multiple time zones:
What about if you are not the organizer of your meetings? If you are not the organizer of meetings that are infringing upon your family and nonwork time, speak up! That is, don't be afraid to let those who are scheduling those meetings know that they're impacting your home life. Perhaps that sounds difficult. How do you tell your boss, “Hey, you're killing me here with these dinnertime meetings?” Try raising their awareness by putting it in an in‐person context. You might mention that before the pandemic, we wouldn't schedule a face‐to‐face meeting in the office at this time. Is there a way we can avoid doing it when we meet virtually or hybrid, too?
Science supports the decision to keep work to predefined business hours. Specifically, there is strong evidence that longer work hours, especially when they include before‐ or after‐hours meetings, are related to higher levels of stress, anxiety, depression, and general poor health (Schonfeld and Chang 2017). Let's put that in a lifelike framework. People who work longer hours and have meetings when they should be vegging in front of the TV or even when they ought to be asleep get sick more often and even have greater risk of cardiovascular disease (Smith, Folkard, Tucker, and Evans 2011). Clocking in and out at reasonable times is essential for a healthy mind and body.
Another thing that can be done to mitigate or help eliminate the impact of work–family conflict is to create a virtual commute. In mid‐2020 this became a popular go‐to idea for helping create the cognitive separation between work and home (MacLellan 2021). This virtual commute could be taking the dog for a walk, or listening to your favorite tunes on a drive in the neighborhood, or any number of other things. Think of it as a “me meeting” that is just for you and is all about helping you get in the right mindset at home.
For those opting to work hybrid or fully remote, the daily commute might look different than it had in the past, but the science that supports its value still holds true. Part of what keeps work from spilling over into home is that time to decompress, make some decisions, think through the annoying behavior of a colleague, or whatever else is still lingering on your mind while commuting (Greenhaus and Allen 2011). Carving out that commuting time, whether real or virtual, is critical.
The sudden influx of virtual meetings and some of the infringing on personal time wasn't all bad. It did create a sense of camaraderie that we likely would not have found were it not for the joint work‐from‐home experience. We were all in it together, right? Jared Spataro, corporate vice president (CVP) at Microsoft, stated, “The shared vulnerability of this time has given us a huge opportunity to bring real authenticity to company culture and transform work for the better” (Microsoft 2021). In fact, according to their Work Trend Index survey, 39% of employees said they were more likely to bring their full, authentic selves to work and 31% of employees were less likely to feel embarrassed or ashamed when home life shows up at work. In other words, our shared work‐from‐home experience has introduced a little bit of humanity into our lives as employees in organizations. We are seen not just as our roles but as whole people.
It also offered an opportunity to create connections that would not have happened without the portal into the personal lives of our coworkers. Jay Hyett of Culture Amp recalls a delightful discovery he made on a video call with some colleagues: “I was in a meeting just the other day and someone had a massive collection of LEGOs in their background. Straight after the meeting, I was on Slack going, ‘My God … I just saw your LEGO collection. Can we talk about that?’”
The context through which we view our coworkers has been immeasurably impacted and often positively enhanced by our virtual meetings, which were both distant and intimate at the same time, but there is one important caveat that should be highlighted. In the Microsoft survey, Black and Latino workers in the United States reported they were less likely than the year before to bring their authentic selves to work than the broader population was (26% and 24%, respectively, compared to the national average of 17% who felt less likely to be authentic in their interactions with co‐workers). While the boxes on a Zoom call might all be equal, giving a feel that everyone is showing up in a more egalitarian manner, not everyone in the boxes may feel the same sense of equality and inclusiveness. Efforts always need to be made to ensure that meeting interactions, whether virtual or hybrid, encourage authenticity for all.
The return to the office, whether it's one day a week, three days a week, or even once a month, is also full of subtext. One dimension of this subtext concerns the racial reckoning that swept the United States in the midst of the pandemic. In response to the calls for change, many companies invested time and resources into developing robust diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Through that lens, leaders can be thoughtful in their approach to hybrid meetings that support and incorporate DEI in ways large and small.
Consider the work of Elisabeth Steele Hutchison. She is director of admissions at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, arguably one of the most diverse law schools in the country. However, much of her time since the start of the pandemic has been geared toward helping lawyers and law school professors to be polished and professional on Zoom.
“We are so hyper‐focused on what people look like, and we make judgments incredibly quickly,” she says. “The way that I am presenting myself may be as important as what I'm saying.”
As a woman of color, she's also aware of the additional burden the virtual environment created. She often kicks off her workshops with an image of a white commentator who is “Zooming” in front of a messy background and jokes, “This is Zooming with white privilege. I'm just going to show up. I'm smart. They're just going to know. And that's something that Black folks just have never been able to do.”
That extra level of attention to production value – curating a nondistracting background, ensuring adequate lighting, selecting attire befitting the situation – isn't by chance. Rather she sees it as a reflection of what has traditionally been the case, but has been revamped for the virtual window: “We [Black people] are used to having to be really thoughtful in how we present and having that added burden.”
Even the webcams used for hybrid and virtual meetings can pose problems for those with darker complexions. For example, Elisabeth has had to battle with her webcam photo sensors that attempt to whiten her skin. She's come up with workarounds, but she says it's important to keep this in mind: “There are some people where the technology that we are using for a hybrid meeting or a virtual meeting suits them perfectly. But actually, that is not a given.”
Even the ubiquitous icebreakers that have become a common kickoff to many a meeting can be fraught with problems. Often, they are designed for homogeneous groups and only serve to marginalize those who are not in the majority. (“Okay everyone, please submit a baby photo and we are going to guess who each person is. Guess who …?”) Good intentions can still lead to uncomfortable scenarios.
But we don't know what we don't know, and that's why Elisabeth is a strong advocate for soliciting anonymous feedback after every meeting. However, it's equally important to let participants know that feedback is not just going to be stuffed into a suggestion box, never to be read. Elisabeth kicks off each meeting by reporting on the feedback she received about the previous one. It can spark discussion or give you a chance to explain how you plan to or already have responded to it. The iterative feedback loop shows that you are indeed listening and acting upon suggestions and comments. Attending to the voice of one can benefit all.
Elisabeth likens it to accessibility efforts made for those with disabilities. “When we added captioning to websites, we did it to help those with limited vision. However, we found out we all benefited from it. When we built ramps, we were thinking about people who were wheelchair‐bound, but it turned out to help people who had baby carriages, people who had shopping carts, people who had rolling luggage. So being really thoughtful and intentional in the way we set up meetings in the same way, it's going to help everybody.”
As we transition to hybrid work situations, we need to fix the problems that fully virtual meetings caused. The extra‐long workday and the ever‐expanding numbers of meetings cannot continue, or the burnout will carry on unrestrained, literally killing the workforce. Also, we must be cautious in the rollout of hybrid work as there may be unintended consequences for diversity, equity, and inclusion. An additional problem that we need to address is a result of a solution we touted in our first book, Suddenly Virtual. We made the case for turning the camera on in virtual meetings, but we learned some lessons about this as well. While we are not shying away from that strong assertion, we need to provide some guardrails. In the next chapter, we will take a look at when video is imperative, and, just as importantly, when it's not.