I've spent much of the last couple of years trying to understand online meeting fatigue and experimenting with ways to address the fatigue. The fatigue comes i

I've spent much of the last couple of years trying to understand online meeting fatigue and experimenting with ways to address the fatigue. The fatigue comes in several forms: physical, experiential, psychological. Physical as in the act of being seating in poor posture, for long hours at a time and how this makes us feel. Experiential as in the act of seeing someone on a laptop screen as we are hunched over, they are dithered and the lighting is poor and they sound (their mic + my laptop speakers) muddied and unreal. Psychological as trust, empathy, rapport is founded on presence and connectivity, being able to communicate using gestures, body language, expressions... and how these are all muted or eradicated by the above two. It is addressable but it doesn't come for free. The article tested camera on vs camera off, but not the quality of the experience offered by camera on. Similarly the quality of the experience offered by the audio feels to be even more important than that of the video. To continue their experiment to an extreme... meetings where both the video and audio off wouldn't be fatiguing at all :D To address my experiential side I started with a good microphone, then a better camera, then better (more neutral) speakers. Lighting and positioning of the desk to improve my health as well as how natural I look. For the physical a sit stand desk that I actually do use multiple times per day, and some Birkenstocks help too - I stand for about 1/3 of meetings, and I always keep a bottle of water on the desk. I'm in an engineering leadership role and it's not unusual for me to do 6+ hours of meetings in any given day. At the start of the pandemic I had a lot of exhaustion from such meetings, but where I am now having overhauled my setup and my thinking about it is very different and I find that I really do feel connected and restored through seeing people (I'm more an introvert, and this form now feels like being an extrovert... it's a form of meeting people that I can do). As with anything, seek to understand the fatigue, seek to see how you can overcome it. It doesn't need a big shopping spree, I tweaked one thing every month or two until it all fell into place.