Zoom Fatigue Is Real for CEOs. How to Make Remote Meetings Work for You

Opening your calendar to a Tetris-like slate of back-to-back Zoom meetings could feel daunting, if not totally defeating.

Remote work has become far more common in the U.S. since the pandemic, and today, 27 percent of employees in remote-capable jobs are working exclusively remote, according to Gallup. In some cases, that includes the CEO — even incoming CEOs at the likes of Starbucks and Victoria’s Secret have remote work flexibility.

But some troubling consequences have emerged from remote work, including Zoom fatigue — described in one article as “a collection of physical and psychological responses that come from spending extended periods of time in Zoom or other videoconferencing platforms.”

For CEOs leading fully remote companies, the risks of Zoom fatigue could be high, considering that, on average, CEOs spend about 72 percent of their working time in meetings, according to a 2018 study from Harvard Business School professors.

Loren Castle, the 40-year-old founder and CEO of the L.A.-based natural cookie dough brand Sweet Loren’s, has felt that tension herself, leading her 22-person team in a virtual environment. “You’re busier, almost, on remote,” she says. “Because it’s Zoom, you can pack one thing in after the other. It’s not even like, ‘Oh, there’s an hour break in between so you can get from point A to point B.’ “

Even the CEO of Zoom, Eric Yuan, has admitted to “meeting fatigue,” and once said he had 19 Zoom meetings in a single day.

So, how do remote CEOs remain effective and energized and avoid Zoom-induced slumps? We asked three CEOs, including Castle, to weigh in:

Turn cameras off (when you can)

Ethan Rasiel, the 52-year-old CEO and co-founder of Maplewood, New Jersey-based Lightspeed Public Relations, founded the company in 2013 with a fully virtual schedule. They wanted to access distributed talent, allow for flexibility, and keep costs down, Rasiel says.

Initially, fatigue from software programs like Zoom wasn’t a prominent issue, but it became one as the company grew. And as CEO, Rasiel says he felt the impacts “twice as much as anyone else,” wanting to bring top-tier energy to every call as the “face of the company.”

“Anybody, at any moment, might be staring at your face, and you didn’t know. So you always have to have a smile. You always have to be engaged. And that takes a lot of energy,” Rasiel says. And if you’re being recorded, he says, you might feel additional pressure.

So, about five years ago, he and his co-founder Amanda Proscia devised a solution: encouraging employees to keep cameras off for internal calls. This, he says, has been an effective solution in fighting Zoom fatigue for their team of now 20 full-time employees — as well as for himself as CEO.

“Putting that camera off makes it easier for me to shut up, makes it easy for me to listen, makes it easier for me to let others step into a leadership position or others drive things,” he says.

Cameras-off calls can also allow for much-needed movement, Castle says. Many of her meetings are one-on-one calls, and unless screen sharing is necessary, she’ll often take a walk while on the call. “It’s just important that we all take care of our health,” she says.

Incorporate Zoom breaks

After Jennifer Maguire, the 51-year-old president and founder of Jennifer Maguire Communications and Public Relations in New York City, started leading her team of three remotely during Covid, she instituted a new company policy: avoiding Zoom meetings on Fridays. Sure, a client emergency could come up that might need tending to, but as much as they can, Maguire wants her team to keep Fridays Zoom-free.

“We’re doing things on Friday, and by Monday, we don’t even remember what we said on the Friday call,” Maguire says. “Friday is not a day where new ideas are born.”

Instead, Maguire’s team strives to use this heads-down time on Fridays to work on projects without interruption, which she says has increased their productivity. And for her as CEO, she says this uninterrupted time allows for more strategic planning and creative thinking.

About a year after Lightspeed instituted its cameras-off policy for internal meetings, the company moved its standing client calls to Tuesdays and Thursdays to prioritize more “unbroken blocks of time” on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to do work, Rasiel says. Even though, as CEO, he will still end up on calls five days a week, he says the standing schedule helps him find more time for in-depth work.

“I have to not only execute on what clients ask for, but come up with the strategy and make the suggestions,” he says. “If I only have 30 minutes in between calls to come up with that strategy, it’s really hard. But… having four times as much time, I can get 10 times as many good ideas. It’s made a big difference.”

Even on days that do have frequent Zoom meetings, there are ways to incorporate smaller breaks. For instance, Maguire used to find herself on back-to-back calls without a break. Now, she schedules meetings that would typically be an hour for 50 minutes, allowing for some time to take a break and refresh.

Replace meetings with emails

In addition to strategically scheduling Zooms and determining an on- and off-camera policy, CEOs might consider: Why does this Zoom meeting need to be a meeting at all?

This is even one of Yuan’s recommendations for overcoming Zoom fatigue — leveraging “chat or email” instead of a meeting, as he wrote in an opinion piece for CNN.

At the very least, Maguire recommends that every week leaders choose an item that could be handled over email and reduce the length of their Zoom meeting. For instance, in a recent call with a client, she was able to handle one of the action items beforehand — obtaining a quote from one of her clients for a media outlet — which saved everyone about 13 minutes of valuable time, she says.

“Go back to the basic bullet points with a deadline,” she says, “instead of belaboring it for an hour on a call.”