9 Virtual Meeting Alternatives to Avoid Zoom Fatigue
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Have you looked into virtual meeting alternatives for your team?
As you've probably already learned, Zoom fatigue is real. Virtual meetings require a lot of mental energy and can quickly exhaust and stress your team.
Finally, your team needs to contribute meaningfully during a video call, listening to each other and paying attention to non-verbal cues and body language. They also need to maintain eye contact at all times.
Multiply that by every 1:1, team meeting, and check-in you have on the schedule, and your remote employees may be on the verge of burnout.
Since this time in meetings could be much better spent in blocks of uninterrupted, focused, deep work, we have some ideas that might help.
These virtual meeting alternatives will increase your team's productivity and collaboration without leaving anything behind.
But first: Have you already prioritized asynchronous communication?
If your remote company promotes mental health in the workplace, the first thing you should do is prioritize asynchronous communication.
With this type of communication, employees are not under pressure to stay “on” 24/7 to answer messages or attend last-minute virtual meetings.
They are free to send and respond to messages, requests, and tasks if they are able and able to do so. This frees them from the fear of connection and thus promotes better communication.
Bonus: Asynchronous communication significantly reduces the need for virtual meetings and reduces work-from-home burnout.
For this reason, many of today's virtual meeting alternatives fall under the term asynchronous communication.
If you are not yet using this communication model, you should take the first step today. Include these guides on the topic in your must-read list:
- Everything you need to know about asynchronous communication in remote work environments
- Examples, tools and workflows for asynchronous communication
Once you understand the basics of asynchronous communication, the following virtual meeting alternatives become even better than a video call.
9 Virtual Meeting Alternatives to Help You Avoid Zoom Fatigue
Before you arrange another video call, you should consider whether you should use one of these nine alternatives for virtual meetings instead:
1. Scheduled phone calls (audio only) (and walk-and-talks!)
Audio-only calls are making a big comeback in telecommuting. They're much less stressful than on-camera virtual calls and give employees a break from the screen.
Those: theguardian.com
For this reason, many remote teams have started rescheduling their appointments Walks and conversations where employees are encouraged to take a walk in their neighborhood during the call.
This promotes communication and mental health metrics. But to make phone calls work for your remote team:
- Always schedule calls in advance so that employees can set aside time in their schedule and prepare notes or questions. Point out to them that it's just a phone call and they don't have to be on camera (yay!).
- Set final start and end times. Stick to a time frame of no more than 20 minutes. Let invitees know when you will be calling in their time zone and yours to avoid confusion.
- Prepare and send out an agenda in advance, just like you would for a virtual meeting. This ensures that conversations go according to plan and that participants know what is being discussed (and not taken out of context).
- Do not invite more than three people to the conversation. Unlike virtual meetings, where you can see who is planning to speak next, it is much more difficult to predict the speaker sequence on the phone. Limit the number of participants to organize your calls and give everyone a voice in the conversation.
Try not to overuse conference calls as they can be just as distracting as video calls. You may also want to alternate inviting participants so that employees don't feel left out.
2. email
Email falls out of fashion as new means of communication enter the workplace, and becomes popular again when everyone becomes overwhelmed with using it.
But this classic communication tool can be ideal for your team, especially if you work across different time zones.
Email is best for quickly conveying information, instructions, and customer feedback.
However, long-winded, confusing emails are more likely to be misinterpreted, if they are read at all.
That's why your email communication must be like this:
- Crystal clear. Ask yourself whether someone might misunderstand your instructions or information. Can you make something simpler or easier to understand?
- Concise. By the time someone has to scroll down to finish your message, you've probably already lost their attention. Keep your messages short and to the point!
- Pensive. What questions do you expect after sending this email? Try to put yourself in your recipient's shoes and address any questions, comments, or concerns in your message.
If anyone has additional questions, ideas, or comments, let them know at the end of your email that you would be happy to talk to them further.
3. Direct Message (DM) in Slack or your favorite communication app
Those: slack.com
In a survey we conducted here at We Work Remotely, we found that 80% of remote workers prefer messaging over video calls. And that doesn't surprise us!
Messages to your team, a department, or an individual employee are very effective for conveying a quick question, thought, brainstorm, status update, etc.
Remote workers typically respond to DMs within a few minutes or hours, which is typically faster than email. But make sure you encourage your employees to set healthy boundaries when working remotely so they don't feel pressured to respond as quickly as possible.
Even though DMs are a more casual way of reaching out, they should still remain professional. You don't DM your crush on Instagram, so pretend you're talking to someone at the highest level. Always use complete sentences, avoid slang and abbreviations, and provide all the information someone needs to process your request.
4. Start a topic in your project management software
Setting up a comment thread in your project management software can help you eliminate the need for status update meetings entirely.
Tools wie Trello , Asana and Monday Keep your projects and to-do lists organized in one central location, with each team member assigned their respective tasks and deadlines. Every time you add a comment, everyone involved will receive a notification.
This allows you to limit irrelevant messages and record conversations, ideas and project progress seamlessly and in real time. And it also gets everyone working together productively when your team is remote.
You might want your remote workers to keep a daily or weekly status update log that looks something like this:
- What I have achieved / What I am currently doing / What I plan to do next
- Current task / obstacles I'm facing / gains I've made
- Progress on daily goal / Progress on weekly goal / Current challenges
This streamlines your project updates and controls, virtually eliminating the need for virtual meetings.
5. Use collaborative markup functions
Working with collaborative tools like Google and Microsoft Word means that everything your team creates opens a line of communication.
For example, when someone shares a Google Doc or spreadsheet, your team can leave comments on the document's exact words, paragraphs, ideas, images, or lines. You can also add memos, explanations, questions, links to external resources, and more.
Anyone invited to collaborate can see and respond to these comments in real time. This could eliminate the need for a virtual meeting to discuss these issues.
If you work in Google, you should turn on Suggest mode. Then you and your team can leave your suggestions in the original document and the owners/creators can either accept or reject them.
The software tracks and saves comments and additions so you always have the most current file to work on and collaborate on. Each team member also has everyone else's suggestions in one place, without having to wade through email chains or Slack threads to make edits.
6. Record video to share
Those: bhphotovideo.com
Recording videos is one of the hottest trends in the telecommuting world, and for good reason.
Free apps like Loom , weedyard , CloudApp and Soapbox Allow employees to record themselves, their screens, or both.
You and your team can create quick videos to explain specific processes, train employees on new protocols, teach them how to use a new tool, give a presentation, and more.
Basically, all the things you would probably do in a virtual meeting - only better.
When you record a video and send it to your team, they can watch it on their own time instead of being present at a meeting. They can also pause, take notes, rewind to watch a part they missed, and come back to these videos later if they have any questions.
Make it a habit to save these videos and you can use them every time you onboard a new employee to quickly and easily update them.
Send 7 surveys
Those: uni-due.de
Surveys are becoming increasingly popular for remote companies as they are a quick way to get honest and actionable feedback from your employees.
And if you want to lead a high-performing remote team you need to learn to listen to suggestions and put good ideas into practice.
Surveys provide team members with a seamless, anonymous way to raise concerns they may not want to raise in a virtual meeting. And they offer introverted team members or new employees the opportunity to express themselves.
Free survey options like Google Formulare , written form and SurveyMonkey allow you to ask questions, request feedback, and address topics you would normally discuss in a meeting. This allows you to capture more thoughtful responses and take time to analyze the results you collect.
8. Brainstorm with an online whiteboard
Brainstorming sessions are one of the most common reasons for virtual meetings. But what if you could gather everyone around a virtual whiteboard instead?
You can exchange ideas and share visual thoughts in the virtual space without awkward pauses or participants talking over each other.
Your remote employees can add sticky notes, draw pictures or diagrams, add links to shared documents for reference, making collaboration less stressful.
Add a prompt to your whiteboard, invite everyone to contribute, and watch the creative juices flow!
9. Create an FAQ sheet or add it to your knowledge base/company wiki
If you're planning a virtual meeting to explain a new company process, initiative, or policy, consider creating an FAQ sheet instead.
Summarize your message at the top and then address questions employees may have below.
Pin this document to the appropriate Slack channels, email it to the team, share it in your Google Drive/Dropbox, and let everyone know where they can view it.
You should also include this one-pager in your internal knowledge base/company wiki.
You avoid having to share the same information with multiple people. and having a resource that both new and current employees can access in the future.
Try these virtual meeting alternatives with your remote team now!
Those: it-daily.net
Virtual meetings are fantastic for connecting remote teams, socializing and sharing. However, if overused, they can lead to burnout and cause more stress than productive, focused work hours for your team.
These virtual meeting alternatives will help you save time for the video calls that really matter and have higher priority.
So before you schedule your next Zoom call, consider using one of these other resources. Your remote team will thank you!
