DESIGN ORGANIZATION AND ENVIRONMENT / ALBERTO ANDREU PINILLOS

The new forms of work, which have accelerated dramatically since the pandemic began, are bringing new debates in the field of management of people. result One of the most interesting for me in recent months has to do with understanding which is more tiring, the face-to-face work or the remote one.

Some authors have begun to coin the concept of "zoom fatigue" (at reference letter to the video conferencing platform that has exploded in recent months) to explain why digital fatigue is greater than face-to-face fatigue. The cause of this extra fatigue is that, as many nuances of interpersonal and non-verbal communication are lost through the computer, the brain has to make a greater effort than it does in face-to-face meetings to interpret these implicit messages. According to Andrew Franklin, Associate Professor of cyberpsychology at Norfolk State University, "for someone who relies on those nonverbal cues, not having them can be exhausting." In a similar vein, José Ramón Ubieto, professor partner of the UOC's Psychology and Science programs of study Education , stated in a article that, "in the face-to-face, body and image are accompanied and held together, with the addition of the word", a union that does not occur in the virtual environment and that generates more stress in conversations.

All that being true, in my opinion, "what is tiring, and exhausting, is paying attention", as Roberto Fontanarrosa (Rosario, Argentina, 1944), one of Argentina's leading cartoonists, used to say. Therefore, I am not so sure that it is more tiring to pay attention in the digital format than in the face-to-face format. In fact, there are people who connect to meetings, lying in bed, with the camera on and listening to music in the background. Therefore, the core topic, in my opinion, is in knowing how to create new habits in the disconnections or in the pauses of attention, to rest and thus to be able to activate it again when it corresponds.

In the face-to-face format, between meeting and meeting, these pauses or disconnections can be a machine coffee with a colleague, a walk to go to the bathroom, an interruption from a colleague who asks you something, a phone call, a change of floor for another meeting, or taking a cab to move to another place. In the same way, already inside a meeting or a committee, we also look for those pauses to rest our brain by chatting with a colleague, answering an email or a wassap, or temporarily abandoning the conference room, if possible. In any case, these pauses are often not programmed... we simply take them almost automatically because we are already in the habit of looking for short breaks.

The question, therefore, is how we organize these breaks in digital format (in zoom, in teams, in meet or whatever platform we use). It is clear that, as we had not developed this habit, in these months of pandemic we have been "stuffed" with virtual meetings, joining one after another without any pause, which has caused a lot of fatigue (digital and physical). 

Thus, the core topic is to know how to create (and plan) new habits that help us to manage disconnections and, with them, micro breaks. Everyone will have to find their own, but I dare to suggest a few. For example, to organize the video conferences of the day we have to leave a minimum space between one and another to, for example, have a coffee, make a call to a friend, go out to buy bread, do push-ups or play a song; try to have a comfortable place from which to work; or alternate spaces that allow you to have video conferences sitting and standing (there are already small backlit tripods that allow connections beyond the desktop computer). And, if we are already in a video, do not hesitate to disconnect the camera at a certain moment, or even chat privately with another attendee at meeting to open what is happening.

Therefore, I am not sure that "digital fatigue" is greater than "face-to-face fatigue". The core topic is that, while in the face-to-face we have already learned some habits to disconnect, now we will have to generate new disconnection habits for the digital format. Because, as Fontanarrosa used to say, what is tiring is paying attention.