Even as companies welcome back employees to workplaces, virtual meetings will be here to stay, so how do we make them go from a painful necessity to a productive tool?<\/p>\n
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Since the pandemic began, many of us have been glued to our devices, trying to make the best of virtual communication. The move to Zoom has forced us to scramble and come up with new solutions to keep things interesting \u2014 from just\u00a0mastering the basics<\/a>\u00a0to more whimsical methods, like having a\u00a0llama from an animal sanctuary join the call<\/a>. But, as great as it is to have a llama at a meeting, how do we\u00a0really\u00a0fix the problem of making virtual meetings more collaborative and engaging?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The virtualization of work has generally increased the hours that people spend on the clock, and blurred boundaries between life and work. \u201cVideo fatigue\u201d\u00a0comes from<\/a>\u00a0many factors, such as the difficulty of making real eye contact with meeting participants (known as \u201cgaze awareness\u201d). Research<\/a>\u00a0by Microsoft shows that concentration begins to fray about 30-40 minutes into a meeting, and that stress begins to increase after about two hours of videoconferencing. These physical issues feed strategic challenges faced by many executives: engaging in creative problem solving or holding contentious discussions given the constraints of virtual meetings.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Even as companies welcome back employees to workplaces, virtual meetings will be here to stay, so how do we make them go from a painful necessity to a productive tool?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Over the course of our work (three of us at management consultancy Innosight, one of us at DBS Bank), we\u2019ve worked with groups to find innovative solutions to virtual-work problems, and, recently, we conducted a\u00a0LinkedIn discussion<\/a>\u00a0in the Harvard Business Review Discussion group for fresh, crowdsourced ideas.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Our goal was to help others find ways to improve Zoom calls, using techniques we\u2019ve used with companies worldwide to build their innovation capabilities, which we also described in a previous magazine\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0and covered in more detail in our new\u00a0book<\/a>\u00a0Eat, Sleep, Innovate.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The basic idea is to borrow from the behavior change literature and use behavior enablers, artifacts, and nudges (we call them BEANs) to make desired behaviors habitual. Behavior enablers directly help people follow desired behaviors (think checklists). Artifacts and nudges act as powerful indirect reinforcements (consider visual reminders or gamification).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n