Overcoming Virtual Meetings Fatigue

Good to know that the author is an enneagram 5. That makes his advice so much more relatable!

you were attending too many meetings period! Do something productive instead :-)

I didn’t see a number of meetings in the article; maybe I missed that. But the author is a para-church ministry employee of an organization with a larger staff than most churches. … and probably frequently works with large churches with a lot of staff.

My own employment is with a nonprofit with about 130 employees and I can tell you that zoom fatigue is a genuine problem. But when you can’t work in the office, quite a bit of coordination over distance is necessary.

The upside of that has been that we’re all actually getting to know each-other better. In the past we often had these meetings kind of like this:

• Group in conference room in city A has 1 laptop with mic and a projector
• Connect with Group in city B sitting in a conference room also with 1 computer, mic and a projector

So we would all see each other as tiny figures at a table, not hear eachother well, never get a good read on facial expressions, never engage in casual chit chat.

The circumstances have forced us to use the technology properly. It never made sense to do it that way, and I tried to persuaded leaders to let us all hook into the meeting from our desks. But it seemed intuitive that being physically together was better.

Not better.

Now we all get to see each other’s faces and it’s easy to hear and easy to speak up… and arriving at meetings a little early and chatting about pets and weather and kids with people on the other side of the country is quite common.

Church use is quite a bit different, especially for smaller congregations and staffs, but not completely different.