Hollywood knows a thing or two about storytelling.
From the beginning of the movie business, the industry quickly understood that audiences craved action, romance and comedy. And, if box office receipts are any measure, a lot has stayed the same. Recent blockbusters like “Top Gun: Maverick” are driving billions of dollars in sales.
So, what makes Hollywood blockbusters so successful? It's called audience engagement.
But we lesser mortals face different challenges regarding virtual meetings.
Our Post-COVID Life
In a January interview with the Wall Street Journal, the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, stated, "There's no going back to 2019. But at the same time, it's not as if we're in 2020. We're all trying to crack that combination."
Indeed, the world has changed irrevocably since the pandemic. With it came the immediate need to work from home. With that also came the rapid rise of virtual meetings.
But with every new development of historic proportions comes a procession of consequences.
One of those is that vague malaise dubbed Meeting Fatigue.
Meeting fatigue is a new phenomenon characterised by exhaustion and burnout after people participate in virtual meetings for extended periods.
People report feelings like being constantly scrutinised, which triggers anxiety. Virtual meetings lack the non-verbal cues of face-to-face communication, like body language. Gone is the power of social cues to understand the nuances of conversations. And there's the heavy cognitive load as employees process multiple video calls and maintain focus. Meeting fatigue has increased stress and fatigue, while continual multitasking has lessened the attention span.
Attention Spans Are in Short Supply
"Research suggests that the average attention span for an adult is around 20 minutes," said Franziska Brandl, Sales Director DACH, BeNeLux, Nordics at BlueJeans by Verizon. "When you're in a virtual meeting, your mobile phone beeps, the dog barks, or the doorbell rings, and your attention naturally shifts. That makes it difficult to refocus on the content of the meeting," she explained.
We All Can't Be Tom Cruise
The day-to-day issues of running our remote and hybrid lives are a long way from the big lights of Hollywood.
With the daily demands of remote work, business professionals are often pressed into an entirely different task of giving presentations to hundreds of employees across multiple time zones.
Presenters organise their content (not unlike the dialogue in a movie script) and hope that when the event starts, they'll get their ideas across. That's no small feat given the current psychological malaise of meeting fatigue.
